In the week after Nour received that message, others in Lebanon reportedly began receiving messages via automated calls to 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 8am and 8:30am on Monday, 80,000 people in Lebanon received these messages, according to a spokesman for the Lebanese telecommunications network Ogero, who declined to be named. One of those calls reached the office of Lebanon’s communications minister, Ziad Makari, who attributed the message to psychological warfare by the Israelis.
Exactly how these phone calls were made is unclear. Media suggestions that Lebanon’s telecommunications systems had been hacked were dismissed by the company, which normally blocks phone numbers calling from Israel.
Instead, the calls were generated by “friendly countries that we don’t have on our block list,” Augero claimed, declining to specify which ones. The Israel Defense Forces declined to comment on the messages or how they were sent.
Warring parties have an obligation to warn civilians in advance of an attack, said Lama Fakih, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “For warnings to be effective under the law, they have to be specific,” she says. However, these reports did not mention which villages would be attacked. “And that really caused panic among the civilian population.” By Monday evening, highways were jammed with thousands of cars fleeing north. “Hezbollah is a secret organization, so people around [the group] I don’t know where the weapons are,” said Wadih Al-Asmar, co-founder of the Lebanese Center for Human Rights.
Across the border in Israel, phones also vibrated with ominous messages. Late last Wednesday, Aya Yadlin was still awake in central Israel texting a friend when a new message flashed on her phone after midnight. On her screen was an SMS from “OREFAlert”. (Israel’s Home Front Command is also known as Oref for short.) When she opened the message, the SMS read: “Urgent alert. You must enter the bomb shelter immediately. Then there was a relationship.
Momentarily skeptical, Yadlin didn’t click. A lecturer in digital culture at Bar-Ilan University, she knew authorities didn’t send alerts via text message and there was a spelling mistake in Hebrew. After receiving another message – “Hackers have full access to your devices, do a factory reset” – she blocked the number. If she hadn’t, she would probably have received two more messages, like her sister. The third reads in English: “If you want to live, leave. If you want to stay, go to hell.”
The messages were likely a response to the escalation between Israel and Hezbollah, according to a cybersecurity expert in Israel, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the incident.
