In early September, Nour was spending an ordinary evening at home in Beirut, eating pumpkin seeds and watching Netflix, when the text message arrived on her device like the smartphone version of a brick through her window. The sender’s name appeared as eight question marks, “????? ???,” and in the preview of the message, written in clumsy, hard-to-understand Arabic, she could read a threat: “We have enough bullets for everyone who needs them.”
To Nour, whose name has been changed to protect her anonymity, it was clear who had sent the message. “Israel,” she says, “that’s their tone.” The Israeli military did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment on whether it was the source of the message. But the text came at a time when Lebanon was on edge, days after Israel and the Lebanon-based group Hezbollah exchanged airstrikes and rockets. It’s unclear how many other people received the text threat, though Nour says she’s seen screenshots of the same message on social media. She 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, people in Lebanon began receiving recorded phone calls asking for information about missing Israeli pilot 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 thought was Israeli was in 2006, and she was a teenager living in the southern suburbs of Beirut. She remembers picking up the landline and hearing a robotic voice announce a message that began, “Dear Lebanese people.” That call followed a months-long war that has killed more than 1,000 people and forced 900,000 to flee their homes.
Violence also accompanied last week’s text messages. Israel and Hezbollah have exchanged fire since the war in Gaza began, with a major escalation this week. The latest Israeli airstrikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon were the deadliest in decades, killing 558 on Monday alone, the country’s health minister said.
On Wednesday, Hezbollah launched a rocket into Tel Aviv, which was shot down. There were no reports of casualties. While Lebanese people are checking on the safety of their family and friends, “most people are more attached to their phones now than usual,” said Mohamad Najem, executive director of the Beirut-based digital rights group SMEX. These messages are puncturing the sense of security people often feel around their phones. “It definitely creates [a feeling of] uncertainty for people and fear.”
Citizens in Israel are also receiving threatening text messages across the border. The terrifying messages show the psychological role personal smartphones are now playing in the conflict on both sides of the border.
The week after Nour got that text, others in Lebanon began receiving messages via automated calls to their landlines or via text message. “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. Some 80,000 people across Lebanon received the messages between 8:00 and 8:30 a.m. Monday, according to a spokesman for Lebanon’s Ogero telecom network, who asked not to be named. One of the calls was received by the office of Lebanon’s Communications Minister Ziad Makary, who attributed the message to psychological warfare by the Israelis.
