In early September, Nour was spending a regular evening at home in Beirut—eating pumpkin seeds and watching Netflix—when a text message hit her device like a smartphone brick through the window. The sender’s name appeared as eight question marks, “??????????,” and in the message preview, she could read, in clumsy, hard-to-understand Arabic, a threat: “We have enough bullets for anyone who needs them.”
To Nour, whose name has been changed to protect her anonymity, it was obvious who sent the message. “Israel,” she says, “is their tone.” The Israeli military did not respond to WIRED’s inquiry about whether they were the source of the message. But the text came at a time when Lebanon was on edge, days after Israel and the Lebanese group Hezbollah exchanged air attacks and missilesIt’s unclear how many other people received the threatening text message, though Nour says she saw screenshots of the same message on social media. She was concerned the text might contain a malicious link. “I didn’t dare open it,” Nour says.
In Lebanon, the idea of receiving news from Israel is not novel. In the early 21st century, people in Lebanon received recorded telephone conversationsseeking information about missing Israeli pilot Ron Arad, whose plane crashed during a bombing in the 1980s and is now presumed dead. The last time Nour received a message from someone she thought was Israeli was in 2006, when she was a teenager living in a southern suburb of Beirut. She remembers picking up her landline and hearing a robotic voice announcing a message that began with the words, “Dear Lebanese.” That call came after a month-long war that killed more than 1000 people and forced 900,000 run away from their homes.
Violence also accompanied the text message last week. Israel and Hezbollah have been exchanging fire since the beginning of the war in Gaza, and this week there was a major escalation. Recent Israeli airstrikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon were the deadliest in decades, killing 558 people on Monday alone, according to the country’s health minister.
On Wednesday, Hezbollah fired a rocket at Tel Aviv that was shot down. There were no reports of casualties. As Lebanese check on the safety of their families and friends, “most people are more attached to their phones than usual,” said Mohamad Najem, executive director of the Beirut-based digital rights group SMEX. The news punctures the sense of security people often feel when they are near their phones. “It definitely creates [a feeling of] uncertainty and fear among people.”
Across the border, civilians in Israel are also receiving text threatswith disturbing news revealing the psychological role smartphones play in the conflict on both sides of the border.
A week after Nour received the news, others in Lebanon reportedly began receiving messages via automated calls to their landlines or via 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 the airstrike. According to a spokesman for Lebanon’s Ogero telecommunications network, who declined to be named, 80,000 people across Lebanon received the messages between 8 and 8:30 a.m. Monday. One of the calls reached the office of Lebanese Communications Minister Ziad Makarii, who assigned Israelis’ message on psychological warfare.