In September 2024, when Israel escalated its bombing campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shiite sheikh Rabih Koubayssi was one of the few clerics, Muslim or Christian, to stay in the targeted southern region. He was needed to bury the dead.
His first Islamic duty was to wash the bodies, which were often charred or missing a limb. He laid the body on an elevated table, turned it to face Mecca, and washed each part three times. Then he wrapped it in a burial cloth. Finally, he recited a Muslim prayer for Allah’s mercy. Assistants enclosed the body in a green bag, the color of Islam. He wrote the person’s name on the outside with a black marker.
On one occasion, a woman clad in an all-black abaya tossed flowers onto the hospital gurney carrying her dead father and brother. On another, Koubayssi discovered the body belonged to one of his students at the Islamic university.
Then on October 9, 2024, a Christian body arrived. Israel had bombed a civil defense center in the village of Derdghaya, damaging the church next to it. The strike killed five emergency workers, including Joseph al-Badawi, who had sent his parents and wife to safer areas while he remained on the job.
“How do I respect a Christian body?” Koubayssi asked himself.
The sheikh, a member of the Supreme Islamic Shiite Council of Lebanon, called Marious Khairallah, a Catholic priest in a village near Tyre who had also stayed behind during the war. The two had worked together in the local Forum for Religious Social Responsibility, run by Adyan Foundation, a Beirut-based interfaith organization.
Although the Christian cleric was only 10 minutes away by car, he could not come because of the bombings. Instead, he reassured his friend that Christians do not have similar rituals and that he should take care of the body as best he could.
Koubayssi wiped down Badawi’s body, leaving on the tattered clothes. He struggled to enclose the corpse in nylon as rigor mortis had steeled the right arm in a raised position above the head. Eventually, during a pause in the bombing, the sheikh and priest arranged to deliver a Christian coffin from a nearby Christian-Shiite village. Koubayssi also found a cross, which he laid inside.
The sheikh then coordinated with the Lebanese Army and Red Cross to ensure safe passage to Khairallah’s church, where the priest led Christian funeral rites. Badawi’s family watched over video, and Koubayssi added a Muslim prayer.
On October 26, Adyan honored the cleric during the group’s Spiritual Solidarity Day, which it celebrates annually on the last Saturday of the month. The interfaith group sought nominations to vote for who best demonstrated religious unity during the war, and Koubayssi won handily.
“[Muslim and Christian] blood mixed together,” he said of the Lebanese killed. “Allah created us all and wants us to support one another.”
Established in 2006, Adyan won the 2018 Japan-based Niwano prize, informally known as the Nobel Peace Prize for Religions, focused on peacemaking through interfaith cooperation.
Many consider the Lebanese south as a stronghold of Hezbollah. Koubayssi is a member of the more secular Shiite Amal party, working in its cultural department. He is also the secretary of the Committee for Muslim-Christian Encounter in Tyre, engaging with bishops and priests for religious harmony in the overwhelmingly Shiite region. He enrolls his children in a Catholic school, and sent them and their mother to seek shelter in a monastery during the war. A missile struck his apartment complex on the last day before the ceasefire, damaging his fourth-floor home.
Koubayssi’s favored proposal to fix Lebanon’s corrupt political system is to…
This article was first published at Christianity Today on October 28, 2025. Please click here to read the full text.
Jayson Casper 