The Silent Front: How Israel is Waging a Psychological War

By Current Affairs Editor Adrian Quinn

In mid September this year, Israeli fighter jets, visible to the naked eye, swooped down over Beirut, breaking the sound barrier in the Lebanese capital. This resulted in explosion-like sonic booms which echoed throughout the city, sending residents into panic. A city not unfamiliar to explosions - most notably the Port of Beirut explosion in 2020 which killed at least 218 people - these encroachments on Lebanese airspace by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are not a new phenomenon. Between 2007 and 2021, this occurred 22,111 times, as shown by artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan in his work titled “Air Conditioning”, which was on exhibition in Dublin’s Museum of Modern Art this summer.  Despite these psychological attacks, the morale of many remains strong in Beirut as they take to the internet to make light of these occurrences at the website address ‘jidarsot.com’ (translating to ‘sound barrier’ in phonetic Arabic). Although the city’s citizens attempt to ease its pain through laughter, the reality is that over 2,000 people have died in Lebanon since Israel’s expansion of the war, as well as the death toll in Gaza having surpassed 42,000 at the time of writing. 

The use of psychological terror does not simply stop there. As Israeli jets swept over Beirut in September, the recently deceased leader of the Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, was making a televised speech. Nasrallah addressed the pager and walkie-talkie attacks, which he claimed were choreographed by Israel against his militiamen earlier that week. Over a two day period, thousands of Hezbollah owned communications devices exploded, injuring over 3,000 people and killing over 30, of which at least two were children. Both Hezbollah and the Lebanese government suggested that explosives had been planted in the devices during the stages of production, in a joint effort by the Israeli military and Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad. In widespread video footage of the explosions, Lebanese citizens can be seen panicking as people are indiscriminately maimed and killed throughout the country. This act of terrorism, labelled by notable western media news sources as “eye-catching” and “particularly innovative”, has instilled fear in the minds of not just resistance fighters, but also civilians.

Phone calls, texts and the distribution of leaflets are a further reminder of the omnipresence of the Israeli surveillance machine. From Gaza City to Beirut, citizens regularly receive pre-recorded phone calls, text messages and leaflets from Israeli military personnel containing evacuation orders before airstrikes are carried out in their area. In the case of 40-year-old dentist, Mammoud Shaheen, from Al-Zahra, Israeli operatives called him in October of 2023 informing him that airstrikes would target his home and residential buildings nearby, giving him a short time frame of two hours to evacuate the area of hundreds of civilians, according to an interview conducted by the BBC. In other cases, others have not been so lucky to have been informed of imminent attacks on their homes. On Israel’s northern front in south Lebanon, residents of the small village of Wazzani received unauthorised leaflets prematurely distributed by a brigade of the IDF detailing orders of evacuation in mid September this year. The leaflets also specified that “anyone present in this area after this time will be considered a terrorist” according to one Al Jazeera report. For local residents, abandoning their livelihoods indefinitely is not as easy as these leaflets may suggest. Statements like these may blur the lines between ordinary civilians and those engaged in combat. Matter of fact statements, with disregard to objectivity, construct a truth which shifts the burden of responsibility onto the victims of these attacks.

Assaults on the stability of the Palestinian and Lebanese psyche also take more aggressive forms. The targeting of schools, hospitals, and places of worship - spaces generally associated with safety and fundamental components of functional societies - in Israeli missile strikes, have been a recurring feature in its military campaign. Since the start of the war, hundreds of Palestinians have been massacred at Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza by the IDF. Israel’s government has identified Hamas as operating in tunnels and bunkers underneath the hospital - a claim still unproven. As of May 2024, 31 out of Gaza’s 36 hospitals have been damaged or destroyed. As well as attacks on hospitals, reports have recorded that as many as 90% of schools and universities in Gaza have been either hit or destroyed by Israeli airstrikes. Schools have been used as shelters for the displaced since the start of the war, but Israel identifies the ones it strikes as being Hamas controlled command centres. The destruction of these linchpins of society create a disconnect between people and their homes. It creates an environment that’s not worth fighting for. 

Seventeen years on from Israel’s initial blockade of Gaza, it is no surprise that Gazans are feeling the effects of their suffocation. The World Bank reported in 2022 that 71% of adults in Gaza were experiencing depression. A 2022 report by Save the Children reported that 80% of children were experiencing symptoms of depression, grief or fear, 60% of children were self harming and one in two children had contemplated suicide. These reports, conducted prior to Israel’s war on Gaza, are likely to increase in years to come. Likewise, many citizens of Lebanon, having experienced their own traumas from civil wars, explosions and Israeli torment, are showcasing high levels of anxiety disorders and post traumatic stress disorder. The psychological torture that is being inflicted on these people - seeing the dismembered corpses of your loved ones on the street, not knowing where your child’s next meal will come from, the fear of indiscriminate missile strikes on your home or watching a bedbound teenager burn alive in front of your eyes - is something that these people will have to live with for the rest of their lives, if they’re even fortunate - or unfortunate - enough to survive.