Amid Air Strikes and Rockets, an SMS From the Enemy

At the start of September, Nour was having an ordinary evening at home in Beirut—eating pumpkin seeds and watching Netflix—when the SMS hit her device like the smartphone version of a brick through her window. The sender name appeared as eight question marks, “??? ???”, and in the message preview she could read, in clunky, hard-to-understand Arabic, a threat: “We have enough bullets for everyone who needs them.”

To 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 reply 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 Lebanese-based group Hezbollah had exchanged air strikes and rockets. It’s unclear how many other people received the SMS threat, although Nour says she saw screenshots on social media of the same message. 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, people in Lebanon received recorded phone calls, asking for information about missing Israeli airman Ron Arad, whose plane went down during a bombing mission in the ’80s and is now presumed dead. The last time Nour received a message from a sender she believed to be Israel, it was 2006 and she was a teenager living in the southern suburbs of Beirut. She remembers picking up the landline to hear a robotic voice announce a message that started with the words: “Dear Lebanese people.” That call followed a monthlong war, which killed more than 1,000 people and forced 900,000 to flee their homes.

Violence accompanied last week’s text message too. Israel and Hezbollah have traded fire since the start of the war in Gaza, with a major escalation taking place this week. The latest Israeli airstrikes on Hezbollah targets on Lebanon have been the deadliest in decades, with 558 people killed on Monday alone, according to the country’s health minister.

On Wednesday, Hezbollah launched a rocket at Tel Aviv, which was shot down. There were no reports of casualties. As Lebanese people check on the safety of their family 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 puncture the feelings of safety people often feel around their phones. “It is definitely creating [a feeling of] insecurity for people and fear.”

Across the border, civilians in Israel have also been receiving threatening texts, with the eerie messages demonstrating the psychological role that personal smartphones are now playing in the conflict, on both sides of the border.

The week after Nour got that text, others in Lebanon reportedly began receiving messages via automated calls on their landlines or via text. “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 am and 8:30 am on Monday, 80,000 people across Lebanon received these messages, according to a spokesperson for Lebanese telecoms network Ogero who declined to be named. One of those calls rang through to the office of Lebanon’s minister of communication, Ziad Makary, who attributed the message to psychological warfare by the Israelis.

How exactly these phone calls were made is unclear. Suggestions in the media that Lebanon’s telecommunications systems had been hacked were rebuffed by the company, which normally blocks phone numbers calling from Israel.

“Originating caller ID was masked with an international or local number. It is not a hack,” the Ogero spokesperson told WIRED. “There has been no breach of the official communications network by the Israelis,” reiterated the office of Lebanon’s telecoms minister, Johnny Corm, on X.

Instead, the calls were generated from “friendly countries which we do not have on our blocklist,” Ogero claimed, declining to specify which ones. The Israel Defense Forces declined to comment on the messages or on how they were sent.

Parties at war have an obligation to give civilians advanced warning of attack, says Lama Fakih, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “For warnings to be effective under the law, they should be specific,” she says. These messages, however, did not mention which exact villages would be targeted. “And it did result in panic among the civilian population.” By Monday evening, the highways were jammed with thousands of cars fleeing North. “Hezbollah is a secret organization, so people around [the group] don’t know where the arms are,” claims Wadih Al-Asmar, cofounder of the Lebanese Center for Human Rights.

Across the border in Israel, phones have also been vibrating with ominous messages. Late last Wednesday, Aya Yadlin was still awake in central Israel, texting with a friend, when a new message flashed up on her phone after midnight. On her screen was a SMS from “OREFAlert.” (Israel’s Home Front Command is also known as Oref for short.) When she opened the message, the SMS read: “Emergency alert. You must immediately enter the bomb shelter.” Then there was a link.

Instantly skeptical, Yadlin didn’t click. A lecturer in digital culture at Bar-Ilan University, she knew the authorities didn’t send alerts via text, and there was a typo in the Hebrew. After receiving another message—“Hackers have full access to your devices, return to factory settings”—she blocked the number. If she hadn’t, she would have probably received two more messages, like her sister. The third read in English: “If you want to live, leave. If you want to stay, go to hell.”

These messages were likely a response to the escalation between Israel and Hezbollah, according to a cybersecurity expert in Israel, who declines to be named due to the incident’s sensitivity.