Israel ‘spoofs’ GPS signals amid Gaza onslaught

AMMAN, Jordan

With the outbreak of Israel’s brutal offensive on the Gaza Strip, users of digital navigation systems have been receiving false location signals through the US-operated Global Positioning System (GPS).

GPS users in countries like Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine reported receiving signals telling them that they were in a place hundreds of miles away from their location.

The US-based National Public Radio (NPR) confirmed that the GPS has been wrongly listing planes, people and ships hundreds of miles from Lebanon in the past few months.

Disturbances to the US-operated system are executed in two ways: jamming, which blocks signals within a certain range, and spoofing, which broadcasts false signals to deceive the device about its location.

The practice, which researchers have traced to Israel, is designed to deter rockets and missiles amid an exchange of cross-border fire between Israel and the Lebanese group Hezbollah against the backdrop of Tel Aviv’s deadly offensive on the Gaza Strip.

Earlier this month, residents of central Israel reported disruptions when using GPS-based navigation apps like Waze, Moovit and Google Maps.

Israeli users said that they were given locations in Beirut, Lebanon, likely due to jamming actions by the military, according to the Israeli financial newspaper Globes,

The Israeli army confirmed that it was blocking GPS for defensive purposes following the outbreak of the Gaza conflict on Oct. 7 last year

Todd Humphreys, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, said he and his students have traced the origin of the false signals using data collected from receivers in low Earth orbit.

"That data points to a particular air base run by the [Israeli military] in Israel when we process it," Humphreys, who is an expert on GPS spoofing, told NPR.

"I like to say that spoofing is the new jamming," Humphreys said. "Instead of just jamming the signals and breaking the links with GPS satellites, they're spoon-feeding them false signals.”

Mohammed Aziz, a consultant to Lebanon's Middle East Airlines and a retired airline captain, said unlike jamming, pilots can easily mistake spoofed signals for real ones.

"You don't have a warning on the aircraft that the signal is spoofed," he told NPR.

The Lebanese consultant said the GPS spoofing has prompted pilots “to return to practices half a century old, such as reporting location points on the ground.”

In January, the Federal Aviation Administration warned of safety risks resulting from increased spoofing of the GPS.

Israel has waged a brutal offensive on the Gaza Strip since a cross-border attack by the Palestinian group Hamas on Oct. 7 last year, which Tel Aviv says killed nearly 1,200 people.

More than 34,300 Palestinians have since been killed, mostly women and children, and nearly 77,300 others injured amid mass destruction and severe shortages of necessities.

More than six months into the Israeli war, vast swathes of Gaza lay in ruins, pushing 85% of the enclave’s population into internal displacement amid a crippling blockade of food, clean water and medicine, according to the UN.

Israel stands accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice. An interim ruling in January ordered Tel Aviv to stop genocidal acts and take measures to guarantee that humanitarian assistance is provided to civilians in Gaza.

*Writing by Rania Abu Shamala