Hussein Khalil, an Uber driver in Beirut, is completely disoriented: his GPS recently told him he was in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, one of the consequences of the jamming attributed by the Lebanese authorities to Israel.
“We have been suffering a lot from this problem for about five months,” said the 36-year-old driver, driving his car through the congested streets of the Lebanese capital.
“Sometimes we can’t work for three days in a row (…) and we lose a lot,” he adds.
The jamming is one of many forms of the war that has been going on for nearly nine months in the south of the country between Lebanon’s powerful Hezbollah and Israel.
Since Hezbollah opened the front against Israel on October 8 in support of its Palestinian ally Hamas in Gaza, Beirutis have regularly noticed disruptions in the indication of their geolocation, particularly on Google Maps.
Hussein Khalil shows screenshots showing him sometimes in Rafah, sometimes at Beirut airport or outside the capital.
“A customer called me to ask if I was in Baalbeck,” more than 60 km east of Beirut, “and I told her I would be there in two minutes,” he said.
– Drones and missiles –
The disruption of geolocation via transport applications such as Uber is due to interference in the signals of the GPS system, which the Lebanese government accuses Israel of being behind.
Freddy Khoueiry, a Middle East security analyst at RANE Network, told AFP how “Israel uses GPS jamming primarily to disrupt or interfere with Hezbollah’s communications.”
According to him, Israel also uses “GPS spoofing technology, which is another tactic used to send false GPS signals, in order to… disrupt the use of drones and precision-guided missiles,” which Hezbollah uses to attack Israel.
Since June 28, the level of interference has appeared high on the GPS Jam site, which specializes in collecting data on the interruption of geographic location signals, above Lebanon and certain regions of Syria, Jordan and Israel.
An AFP journalist in Jerusalem was geolocated in Cairo. The interference even seems to extend to the island of Cyprus, where another AFP journalist was geolocated at Beirut airport while she was in the coastal city of Larnaca.
In response to a question from AFP about the jamming in northern Israel, a spokesman for the Israeli Defense Ministry said he was “not currently in a position to discuss operational matters.”
However, the Israeli military made it clear at the start of the war that Israel had disrupted GPS navigation “proactively for various operational needs,” informing the population that this measure could disrupt applications that use geolocation.
– “Map and compass” –
Concerned about the impact of interference on air navigation, the Lebanese government filed a complaint with the UN Security Council on March 22.
In it, he denounces “Israel’s attacks on Lebanese sovereignty by disrupting navigation systems and the security of civil aviation” in Lebanese airspace.
Since March, the General Directorate of Civil Aviation has asked pilots of planes to and from Beirut to “rely on ground navigation kits and not to trust the GPS signal they receive due to interference,” its president, Fadi el-Hassan, told AFP.
“It is inconceivable that a pilot who wants to land at our airport cannot benefit from the GPS function due to interference from the Israeli enemy,” he laments.
Avedis Seropian, a pilot for five years, says he has completely given up on GPS in recent months. “We are used to it. We fly based on the compass and the paper map,” he told AFP.
But, he says, the challenges are unprecedented: “Sometimes we are 32 km above sea level and the screen shows us above the summit of Qornet el-Sawda,” the highest point in Lebanon at over 3,000 meters above sea level.
“When you can’t see the ground, what do you do? You can quickly find yourself in a state of panic and that can lead to an accident or a disaster.”
