The Saint Hilarion complex, one of the oldest monasteries in the Middle East, has been put on the UNESCO list of World Heritage sites in danger due to the war in Gaza, the body said Friday.

UNESCO said the site, which dates back to the fourth century, had been put on the endangered list at the demand of Palestinian authorities and cited the “imminent threats” it faced.

“It’s the only recourse to protect the site from destruction in the current context,”  Lazare Eloundou Assomo, director of the UNESCO World Heritage Center, told AFP, referring to the ongoing war, sparked by Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.

In December, the UNESCO Committee for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict decided to grant the site “provisional enhanced protection” — the highest level of immunity established by the 1954 Hague Convention.

UNESCO said then that it was “already concerned about the state of conservation of sites, before October 7, due to the lack of adequate policies to protect heritage and culture” in Gaza.

During Hamas’s attack on October 7, terrorists murdered some 1,200 people in Israel, most of them civilians, and took 251 hostages.

The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 39,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed more than 15,000 combatants in battle and some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 attack.