By Morgan Meaker for Wired Magazine on September 26, 2024

As Israel intensifies its attacks on Lebanon, eerie messages have been arriving on the phones of civilians on both sides of the border, with authorities in each country accusing the other of psychological warfare.

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.

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https://www.wired.com/story/amid-air-strikes-and-rockets-an-sms-from-the-enemy/