GPS shows some Lebanese citizens in Jordan, likely result of combat-related ‘spoofing’: Experts

BEIRUT — When she got in her car to go to run an errand earlier this week, a Beirut mother of two pulled up her phone as she always did to use GPS, only to find out to her surprise that, at least according to her phone, she was actually in Jordan, 130 miles to the south.

In another incident earlier this month, a group of mothers taking their daughters to a birthday in Bqenneya, just outside Beirut, saw that their route to the party would take them not the few minutes they expected, but five hours. They realized their phones, too, thought they were in Jordan.

Over the past days Breaking Defense has spoken to more than two dozen people in Lebanon who say they’ve experienced the digital dislocation — a spillover effect of what experts suspect is deliberate GPS spoofing targeting military forces in the conflict to the south, though it’s unclear exactly who is doing it.

The incidents have been reported in and around Beirut, as well as elsewhere in the country like Mount Lebanon, Keserwan and Matn. It has apparently affected not only phones but also tablets and AirPods. The Lebanese telecom authority did not respond to a request for comment for this report.

Freddy Khoueiry, global security analyst for the Middle East and North Africa at the RANE Network, suspects Israel is behind the technological assault.

“In this case, the Israelis are likely broadcasting these fake signals with higher strength than genuine GPS signals, causing the map application to place you in a completely incorrect location,” he told Breaking Defense.

Khoueiry said that the real target is likely weapon systems and navigational tools used by combatants, as the spoofing could mislead navigation systems in missiles and drones resulting “in diverted or misdirected operations, causing units to navigate incorrectly, and compromising mission success by making assets appear in the wrong places or sending them into hostile or restricted areas.”

In April, researchers in Texas tied a spate of spoofing then to an Israeli military base, and Israel Defense Forces reportedly said a year ago that they had “restricted” GPS in some combat zones. (In other earlier incidents, some Lebanese citizens reported being digitally transported to the Beirut airport, rather than Jordan.)

Clayton Swope of the Center for Strategic and International Studies agreed that it is “almost certainly an attempt to confuse GPS-guided weapons, like drones and missiles,” but he suggested there’s no certainty it’s the Israelis.

“Since neither Israel, Hezbollah, nor Iran likely wants their munitions hitting anything in Jordan, spoofing GPS so that weapons think they are near [Jordanian capital] Amman undermines their effectiveness,” said Swope, deputy director of aerospace security project at CSIS. “Israel, Hezbollah, and Iran have reasons to confuse GPS-guided weapons used by their adversaries in the region, and any of them could be behind these incidents.”

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Swope said there’s evidence Iran has previously spoofed GPS signals near the Iran-Iraq border and said he “would not be surprised if Iran shared that technology with Hezbollah.”

“Using GPS spoofing does not seem to have an escalatory effect, so it is a tool Iran could share and Hezbollah could use without risk of escalation,” he said.

The GPS spoofing, and jamming in which the signal is disrupted altogether, is not new in Lebanon. The electronic attacks have affected commercial flights in the country since October 2023, which pushed the Lebanese government to file a complaint against Israel to UN.