In early September, Noor was having a normal evening at home in Beirut, eating pumpkin seeds and watching Netflix, when a text message arrived on her device like a brick through the window. Ta. The sender’s name was displayed as eight question marks “????”. ? ? ? ” In a preview of the message, she could read the threat in awkward and hard-to-understand Arabic: “We have enough bullets for everyone who needs them.”
For Noor, whose name has been changed to protect her anonymity, it was clear who sent the message. “Israel, that’s what they say,” she says. The Israeli military did not respond to WIRED’s questions about whether they were the source of the messages. But the document was published at a time when Lebanon was in crisis, days after Israel and the Lebanon-based organization Hezbollah exchanged airstrikes and rockets. It is unclear how many other people received the SMS threat, but Noor said she had seen screenshots of the same message on social media. She was worried that the text might contain malicious links. “I didn’t dare open it,” Noor said.
The idea of receiving messages from Israel is not new in Lebanon. In the early 2000s, people in Lebanon received a recorded phone call asking for information about missing Israeli airman Ron Arad, whose plane crashed during a bombing mission in the 1980s and who is now presumed dead. Ta. The last time Noor received a message from a sender believed to be Israeli was in 2006, when she was a teenager living in Beirut’s southern suburbs. She remembers picking up her landline and hearing a robotic voice announce a message that began with the words “Dear Lebanese.” The call came after a month of war that left more than 1,000 people dead and 900,000 displaced.
Last week’s text messages were also accompanied by violence. Israel and Hezbollah have been exchanging fire in Gaza since the start of the war, with a major escalation this week. Recent Israeli airstrikes against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon are the deadliest in decades, killing 558 people on Monday alone, the country’s health minister announced.
On Wednesday, Hezbollah fired a rocket at Tel Aviv, but it was shot down. There were no reports of casualties. As Lebanese check on their family and friends, “most people are more attached to their phones than usual,” said Mohammad Najem, executive director of Beirut-based digital rights organization SMEX. he says. These messages shatter the sense of security people tend to feel around their phones. “It’s definitely creating anxiety and fear in people.”
Across the border, Israeli civilians are also receiving threatening texts, and the eerie messages show that personal smartphones on both sides of the border are playing a psychological role in the conflict.
The week after Noor received the message, other people in Lebanon also reportedly began receiving automated landline calls and text messages. “If you are in a building with Hezbollah weapons, please do not approach the village until further notice,” the message said, echoing a similar tip received in the Gaza Strip before the airstrikes. was. A spokesperson for the Lebanese communications network Ogello, who declined to be named, said 80,000 people across Lebanon received these messages between 8 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. on Monday. One of the messages rang in the office of Lebanese Communications Minister Ziad Makary, who claimed that the message was the result of psychological warfare by the Israeli side.
