Khalil was born and spent the formative years of her childhood in the Nigerian city of Lagos, when the West African country was still a colony and protectorate ruled by the British Empire.

[4] In a 2017 oral history interview for the Storytellers Project of the Beirut-based feminist Knowledge Workshop (KW) Khalil described her mother as a "society woman" who did not care much about her children.

Khalil stresses that she instead had a very close relationship with her nanny, developed a profound love for nature and always felt in her own identity more Nigerian than Lebanese.

Khalil attended the US-American Beirut Evangelical School for Girls and felt discriminated there, since she mainly spoke Nigerian English and only poor Arabic.

[7] One moonless night during that stay, the two women had a chance encounter on the beach with a green sea turtle laying eggs in the sand.

[12] She teamed up with her friend Habiba Fayed, who shares her passion for conservationism, and they soon opened a bed-and-breakfast in the house, which Khalil's grandfather had built in the 1970s, to finance their environmentalist efforts through ecotourism.

Two rooms of the Orange House were destroyed by Israeli bombardments, but luckily the beach was spared from direct pollution caused by the Jiyeh power station oil spill.

Khalil further wrote that despite the war, some 5,000 hatchlings from 70 loggerheads and 9 green turtle nests made it to the sea that year,[13] noting that it was the best season since the start of the project, because the fighting kept people away from the beach.

[9] In 2008, Mansouri's 1.4 kilometers of sandy beach were officially recognized by the local municipality as a hima - a "community protected zone" – because of its diverse natural features and as turtle nesting grounds.

[15] Nevertheless, the hima has – from a conservation standpoint – faced another threat since 2017 from sewage, light and noise pollution, when construction of a private luxury resort started at the neighbouring beach to the South.

[14] In 2019, authorities put a tax of 10 million Lebanese pounds – then the equivalent of US$400 – on Khalil for crossing with her car the public railway line[16] – which had been abandoned in 1975.

[17] When the COVID-19 pandemic left the beach of Mansouri deserted and the adjacent luxury resort closed, Khalil and her team saw a record number of 20 nests of the endangered green sea turtles.