Posters depicting victims of an airstrike on the consular annex of the Iranian embassy’s headquarters in Damascus are displayed during a memorial service for them at the premises in the Syrian capital on Wednesday, April 3, 2024. (Louai Beshara, AFP via Getty Images/TNS)
(Tribune News Service) — Navigational signals were scrambled over the Tel Aviv metropolitan area on Thursday as Israel braced for a potential Iranian attack on the country’s economic center.
Traffic was delayed, food delivery was disrupted and transportation applications showed Tel Aviv residents to be in Beirut, Lebanon. The measures appeared to be taken by Israeli officials to disrupt GPS-navigated drones or missiles that Iran or its proxies might fire at the country.
Tensions have soared since Monday, when a strike on a Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria killed senior Iranian military officials. Iran blamed Israel and vowed to retaliate, though it was unclear whether it would do so directly or via the militias it funds across the Middle East.
Iran’s main proxy group is Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon and has been trading fire with Israeli forces almost daily since the war in Gaza erupted.
A direct Iranian strike on an Israeli city would be a first and mark a major escalation of hostilities and risk widening the conflict into a regional war.
“We have good intelligence and good early warnings,” Amos Yadlin, a former director of Israeli military intelligence, said at a briefing for foreign journalists in Israel on Thursday. “But it may come, so be tuned.”
Israel hasn’t issued new security directives to its citizens since the Damascus strike, but the military paused leave for all combat units and bolstered manpower in its air defense units.
For months, the military has been interfering with navigational signals in northern Israel and the Red Sea port city of Eilat. Both have come under frequent rocket and drone fire from militants in Lebanon and Yemen.
The military hasn’t publicly acknowledged the GPS disruption in Tel Aviv although it has dominated all conversations in the city. Thursday marked the first time that step was extended to the area during the past six months of the Israel-Hamas war.
The GPS interference affected numerous applications without warning, including Waze, Google Maps, Gett Taxi, Moovit and Wolt.
Israel and Hamas have been at war since the Gaza militant group invaded Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people and taking around 250 hostage. Hamas is designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. and European Union.
Israel launched a ground invasion in Gaza a few weeks later. Over 32,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed in the war, according to the Hamas -run health ministry.
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