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A Lebanese conservationist who spent her life protecting endangered turtles along the country’s southern coast has died after she was injured by an Israeli attack earlier this month, according to local nonprofits.

Mona Khalil, an ecologist in her 70s, “died from injuries sustained in an Israeli strike on her home on the Mansouri beach,” a local nonprofit, Green Southerners, posted on Instagram on Friday. Her assistant was also wounded in the June 4 attack, the nonprofit said.

The Israeli military claimed to CNN that Khalil “was not a target” of the Israel Defense Forces. “There is no known IDF strike in which she was injured,” the military said in a statement Saturday. “However, strikes were conducted in the area after the IDF issued evacuation warnings.”

After seeking refuge in the Netherlands from the Lebanese civil war, Khalil returned to the city of Tyre in 2000, having inherited a piece of land from her grandmother.

That same year, she established The Orange House Project, a conservation initiative to safeguard the eggs of endangered green turtles and loggerhead sea turtles during hatching season. Khalil painted her house orange to symbolize the safe haven the Netherlands had provided her with.

Nearly a decade ago, CNN wrote a profile of Khalil, in which she said she “refused” to leave her land and the turtles, even when hostilities escalated between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006.

“This project was my dream since I was a child. I loved the beach and the land here,” Khalil said at the time.

The Israeli campaign in Lebanon, launched after Hezbollah fired projectiles into northern Israel earlier this year, has killed 4,057 people since March 2, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health.

CNN’s Chris Giles and Eugenia Yosef contributed reporting.