From the Liveblog of
Thursday, August 1, 2024
Lebanon lodges complaint with UN over Israel’s disruption of its GPS systems
Add ToI as a Preferred Source on GoogleGianluca Pacchiani is the Arab affairs reporter for The Times of Israel
The Lebanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs lodges a complaint with the UN Security Council and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres requesting to condemn “Israel’s cyberattacks on Lebanon,” the state-run National News Agency (NNA) reports.
The complaint is based on a report by Beirut’s Ministry of Telecommunications which found that signal interference from northern Israel led to a decline in the accuracy of navigation systems in Lebanon, impacting a host of applications.
Disruptions to the Global Positioning System (GPS) in Lebanon “jeopardize the country’s civil aviation services and telecom systems at vital facilities,” NNA writes.
The Israel Defense Forces has been blocking some GPS signals amid the ongoing war with the Palestinian terror group Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and clashes with Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
Since the early days of the war, Israeli motorists using navigation apps like Waze and Google Maps would often see their locations show up completely wrong — users in Tel Aviv would be marked in Cairo, while people in Haifa would show up as in Beirut.
In March, Beirut announced that it would file an urgent complaint with the UNSC over the same issue, which it then defined as a “violation of its sovereignty” by Israel.
The Times of Israel Community.