In early September, Nour was spending a normal afternoon at home in Beirut, eating pumpkin seeds and watching Netflix, when the text message arrived on her device like a smartphone version of a brick through her window. The sender’s name appeared in the form of eight question marks — “????? ???” — and the preview of the message read, in clumsy, hard-to-understand Arabic, a threat: “We have enough bullets for everyone who needs them.”
For Nour, whose name has been changed to protect her anonymity, it was obvious who had sent this message. “Israel,” she says, “that’s their tone.” The Israeli military did not respond to WIRED’s question about whether they were the source of the message. But the text appeared at a time when Lebanon was on edge, days after Israel and the Lebanon-based group Hezbollah exchanged statements. airstrikes and rocketsIt’s unclear how many other people received the SMS threat, though Nour says she saw screenshots of the same message on social media. She was worried the text might contain a malicious link. “I didn’t dare open it,” Nour says.
In Lebanon, the idea of receiving a message from Israel is not new. In the early 2000s, the Lebanese received recorded phone callsasking for information about missing Israeli airman Ron Arad, whose plane crashed during a bombing mission in the 1980s and is now presumed dead. The last time Nour received a message from a sender she believed to be Israel was in 2006, when she was a teenager living in the southern suburbs of Beirut. She remembers picking up the landline to hear a robotic voice announcing a message that began with the words: “Dear Lebanese people.” That call followed a month-long war in which more than 1,000 people were killed. 1,000 people and forced 900,000 to flee their homes.
Violence also accompanied last week’s text message. Israel and Hezbollah have exchanged fire since the start of the war in Gaza, and this week saw a major escalation. The latest Israeli airstrikes against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon have been the deadliest in decades, with 558 people killed on Monday alone, according to the Minister of Health of the country.
On Wednesday, Hezbollah launched a rocket at Tel Aviv, which was shot down. There were no reports of casualties. While Lebanese worry about the safety of their relatives and friends, “most people are now more attached to their phones than usual,” says Mohamad Najem, executive director of the Beirut-based digital rights group SMEX. These messages hurt the sense of security people usually feel when they are near their phones. “They are definitely creating[a feeling of]insecurity and fear in people.”
Across the border, civilians in Israel have also been receiving threatening textswith disturbing messages that demonstrate the psychological role that personal smartphones now play in the conflict, on both sides of the border.
The week after Nour received that text message, others in Lebanon reportedly began… reception Messages came via automated calls to their landlines or text messages. “If you are in a building with Hezbollah weapons, stay away from the village until further notice,” the message said, echoing similar calls. received In Gaza, before an airstrike between 8 and 8.30 a.m. on Monday, 80,000 people across Lebanon received such messages, according to a spokesman for the Lebanese telecommunications network, Ogero, who asked not to be named. One of those calls reached the office of Lebanon’s communications minister, Ziad Makary, who attributed The message of psychological warfare by the Israelis.