BEIRUT: Uber driver Hussein Khalil was battling traffic in Beirut when he found himself in the Gaza Strip — according to his online map, anyway — as location jamming blamed on Israel disrupts life in Lebanon.
“We’ve been dealing with this problem a lot for around five months,” said Khalil, 36.
“Sometimes we can’t work at all,” the disgruntled driver said on Beirut’s chaotic, car-choked streets.
“Of course, we are losing money.”
For months, whacky location data on apps have caused confusion in Lebanon, where the Hezbollah militant group has been engaged in cross-border clashes with Israel.
The near-daily exchanges started after Hamas, Hezbollah’s Palestinian ally, launched an unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, triggering the ongoing war in Gaza.
In March, Beirut lodged a complaint with the United Nations about “attacks by Israel on Lebanese sovereignty in the form of jamming the airspace around” the Beirut airport.
Khalil showed screenshots of apps displaying his locations not only in the Gazan city of Rafah — around 300 kilometers away — but also in east Lebanon near the Syrian border, when he was actually in Beirut.
With online maps loopy, Khalil said “one passenger phoned me and asked, ‘Are you in Baalbek?’” referring to a city in east Lebanon.
“I told her: ‘No, I’ll be at your location (in Beirut) in two minutes’.”
Numerous residents have reported their online map location as appearing at Beirut airport while they were actually elsewhere in the capital.
Since Hamas’s October 7 attack, Israel has taken measures to disrupt Global Positioning System (GPS) functionality for the group and other opponents.
The Israeli army said in October that it disrupted GPS “in a proactive manner for various operational needs.”
It warned of “various and temporary effects on location-based applications.”
Specialist site gpsjam.org, which compiles geolocation signal disruption data based on aircraft data reports, reported a low level of disruption around Gaza on October 7.
But the next day, disturbances increased around the Palestinian territory and also along the border between Israel and Lebanon.
On June 28, the level of interference showing on the site was high above Lebanon and parts of Syria, Jordan and Israel.
An AFP journalist in Jerusalem said her location appeared as if she was in Cairo, Egypt’s capital about 400 kilometers away.
The interference has at times extended to European Union member Cyprus, some 200 kilometers from Lebanon, where AFP journalists have reported their GPS location appearing at Beirut airport instead of on the island.
“Israel is using GPS jamming to disrupt or interfere with Hezbollah’s communications,” said Freddy Khoueiry, global security analyst for the Middle East and North Africa at risk intelligence company RANE.
It is “also using GPS spoofing... to send false GPS signals, aimed at disrupting and hindering drones’ and precision-guided missiles’ abilities to function or hit their targets,” he added.
The Iran-backed Hezbollah has “a large arsenal” of such GPS-assisted weapons, he noted.
The cross-border exchanges have killed more than 490 people in Lebanon — mostly fighters — according to an AFP tally, with 26 people killed in northern Israel, according to authorities there.
Fears have grown of all-out conflict between the foes that last went to war in 2006.
Asked about GPS jamming in northern Israel, where Hezbollah has concentrated its attacks, a spokesperson for Israel’s defense ministry said’s Jerusalem office that “currently, we are unable to discuss operational matters.”
Lebanon’s civil aviation chief Fadi El-Hassan said that since March, the body has asked pilots flying in or out of Beirut to “rely on ground navigation equipment and not on GPS signals due to the ongoing interference in the region.”
Ground navigation equipment is typically used as a back-up system.
Hassan expressed frustration that “in this technological age, a pilot who wants to land at our airport cannot use GPS due to Israeli enemy interference.”
Lebanon is ensuring “the maintenance of ground navigation equipment at all times in order to provide the necessary signals for pilots to land safely,” he said.
Avedis Seropian, a licensed pilot, said he had stopped using GPS in recent months.
“We got used to the situation. I don’t rely on (GPS) at all... I fly relying on a compass and paper map,” he said.
But he said not having GPS, even as a fallback, was disconcerting.
When geolocation data is wrong and visibility is poor, “you can suddenly find yourself in a state of panic,” he said.
“That could lead to an accident or a disaster.”

DUBAI: Over 20 years ago, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stood before a crowd at Friday prayers to denounce the United States for its disenchanted electorate.
“It is disgraceful for a nation to have a 35 percent or 40 percent voter turnout, as happens in some of the nations that you see having presidential elections,” Khamenei said in 2001. “It is obvious that their people do not trust their political system, that they do not care about it and that they have no hope.”
Iran now faces what the ayatollah described.
Iran will hold a runoff presidential election Friday, only its second since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, after only 39.9 percent of its voting public cast a ballot the previous week. Of over 24.5 million votes, more than 1 million ballots were later rejected — typically a sign of people feeling obligated to head to the polls but wanting to reject all the candidates.
Meanwhile, public rage simmers after years of Iran’s economy cratering to new lows, along with bloody crackdowns on dissent, including over the mass protests sparked by the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini after her detention by the country’s morality police allegedly over not wearing her headscarf to their liking. Tensions with the West remain high as Iran enriches uranium closer than ever to weapons-grade levels.
Now, hardline former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili faces the reformist Masoud Pezeshkian, a heart surgeon who likely needs a widespread turnout to win the presidency. Pezeshkian’s supporters warn of dark days ahead under Jalili. Meanwhile, many people are unconvinced that their vote even matters.
“I did not vote and I will not, since nobody apologized because of Mahsa and later miseries that young people face, neither the reformists nor the hard-liners,” said Leila Seyyedi, a 23-year-old university student studying graphic design.
Iranian election law requires a candidate to get over 50 percent of the vote to avoid a runoff. In results released Saturday, Pezeshkian got 10.4 million votes while Jalili received 9.4 million. Parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf came in third with 3.3 million, while Shiite cleric Mostafa Pourmohammadi had over 206,000.
Most voters for Qalibaf, a former general in Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard and national police chief known for his crackdowns against students and for corruption allegations, likely will break for Jalili after Qalibaf endorsed him, analysts say. That has put Jalili, a 58-year-old known as the “Living Martyr” for losing a leg in the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, in the lead position for the runoff.
But his recalcitrant reputation among Western diplomats during negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program is paired with concern at home over his views. One politician who has aligned himself with the moderates, former Iranian Information and Communications Technology Minister Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi, put the choice between Jalili and Pezeshkian more starkly.
“We will not let Iran fall into the hands of the Taliban,” he wrote on social platform X.
But even such dark warnings seemingly failed to have an effect. On the streets of Tehran after the June 28 vote, many said they didn’t care about the election.
“I did not vote, as former presidents failed to realize their promises,” said Ahmad Taheri, a 27-year-old psychology student. “I will not vote this coming Friday either.”
Mohammad Ali Robati, a 43-year-old electronic engineer and a father of two, said Iranian officials’ apparent indifference to people’s economic pressures caused him not to vote.
“After years of economic difficulties, I have no interest in politics,” Robati said, though he held out the possibility of voting Friday.
At the time of Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, the exchange rate for Iran’s currency was 32,000 rials to $1. Today, it’s 617,000 rials to $1 — and many have found the value of their bank accounts, retirement funds and other holdings gouged by years of depreciation. It’s nearing its record low of 700,000 rials, briefly reached after Iran’s unprecedented direct attack on Israel in April.
Meanwhile, anger over Amini’s death in September 2022 persists. Her death, in which United Nations investigators said Iran’s government was responsible for the “physical violence” that led to it, sparked months of protests and a security crackdown that killed more than 500 people and saw over 22,000 detained. Less than two years later, hard-liners within Iran’s theocracy have pressed forward with a renewed hijab crackdown.
“The voter participation levels and blank ballots represented a repudiation of regime policies, particularly its crackdown on critics and women who refuse to comply with laws requiring full head covering,” the New York-based Soufan Center think tank said in an analysis Monday.
Pezeshkian has written on X that his government would resist the police enforcement of the hijab along with restrictions on the Internet. However, Tahereh Namazi, a 31-year-old mathematics teacher, said she didn’t vote because neither candidate made a clear pledge on those issues.
Those who didn’t vote and spoke to the AP described their decision as their own, not part of an organized boycott.
Whether voters heed Pezeshkian on Friday remains in question. In recent days, he has repeatedly cited the story of the “selfless farmer,” a tale told to nearly every Iranian child at school about a farmer in 1961 who stripped off his own shirt and set it ablaze to warn a train about boulders blocking the tracks.
Those not taking part in the election believe the train has already crashed.