The airstrikes came like clockwork. Every day between September 19 and November 26, the Israeli Defense Force’s Arabic spokesperson, Avichay Adraee, posted a series of “warnings” on X, mapping that night’s planned attacks on Beirut’s southern suburbs. Targeted buildings were colored in red, and the accompanying messages instructed residents to evacuate. Adraee’s announcements were highly descriptive. Often, he used colloquial or informal names of streets and buildings, and included details known only by locals, demonstrating an eerie level of familiarity with the neighborhoods he was emptying.

My most harrowing night of the war thus far was that of October 3, when Adraee’s tweets featured my hometown of Hadath. There, in aerial view, were the homes of my parents, uncles, and grandparents, and the landmarks of my childhood. Looking at the map from my apartment on the other side of Beirut, I felt a cold sweat on my back. There was Hôpital Sainte-Thérèse where both of my grandmothers passed away, and As-sayde, the church where I have seen friends and family get married or laid to rest. A few moments later, I heard the bombs. When I called my parents, they told me that all the storefronts on Hadath’s main square had been destroyed.

Israeli forces and Hezbollah had been fighting each other since the latter opened a “Support Front” on October 8, 2023 — the day after Hamas broke through Israel’s military chokehold of the Gaza Strip and launched its “Al-Aqsa Flood” attack. For nearly a year, the war along the Lebanese border was mostly confined to cross fire that claimed the lives of around six hundred Lebanese and forty Israelis. Then, in mid-September, Israel unleashed its full military might, striking towns, villages, and cities across Lebanon that were presumed to be Hezbollah strongholds. On September 17 and 18, Israeli intelligence services detonated thousands of booby-trapped communication devices allegedly carried by rank-and-file members of Hezbollah. The explosions, many of which took place in crowded civilian spaces, killed dozens of people and injured thousands more; wailing ambulances could be heard throughout the city for two days straight.

The pager and walkie-talkie attacks were followed by a consistent barrage on Beirut and its surrounding areas, accompanied by attacks elsewhere across Lebanon. On the evening of September 27, in what was billed as a targeted attempt to kill Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Israeli fighter jets flattened six residential buildings in Beirut’s southern suburbs, murdering an estimated three hundred people at once. Israeli officials sent warnings to Lebanese paramedics that any ambulance headed towards the bomb site would also be subject to attack. By the time a ceasefire was announced between Israel and Hezbollah on November 26 — an agreement that the U.N. peacekeeping force in Lebanon accused Israel of breaching “approximately 100 times” as of December 2 — the military escalation had killed almost four thousand people, displaced 1.5 million, and irrevocably traumatized and damaged a country already reeling from financial and political crises that have unfolded over many years.

After the pager attack, analysts across the Atlantic praised it as “impressive, indeed stunning” (Foreign Policy) and “an intelligence triumph” (The Washington Post). Michael Doran, a fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, posted on X that it represented “a reworking of the story of the Trojan Horse for the digital age, and it deserves to become nearly as legendary as its iconic predecessor.” Democratic Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona told Jewish Insider that it was a “creative way to go after a terrorist organization.” In the same article, Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii was quoted as saying that even those who had spoken out about the war’s civilian toll “should be a little cautious to criticize an operation this precise.”

This response was emblematic of a dynamic in which American and British politicians and media organizations endorse and repeat Israel’s logic and rhetoric, particularly the common Israeli refrain that theirs is the world’s most moral army. A central feature of this myth is Israel’s practice of warning civilians ahead of planned military onslaughts. In January, when Galit Raguan, a director at the Israeli Ministry of Justice, defended Israel in the International Court of Justice against charges of committing genocide in Gaza, she claimed that the IDF takes a number of “precautionary measures,” including providing “effective advance warnings of attacks where circumstances permit,” through flyers, phone calls, radio and social media. “This requires time,” said Raguan. “It requires resources and intelligence — and the IDF invests all of these to save civilian lives.”

The Anglophone commentariat has regurgitated this particular argument whole. In April, for example, the British columnist Zoe Strimpel wrote in The Telegraph that the media shouldn’t jump to conclusions about the mass grave found in Khan Younis, in part because the IDF has a “strong claim to being the most moral army in the world.” Her key evidence for this much-parroted refrain was that “unlike most, Israel drops leaflets and sends texts to people before any attacks so they can evacuate.” In February, Gregg Roman, the Israeli American director of the U.S. think tank Middle East Forum (who has also worked at the Israeli Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense), claimed that Israel was actually operating with too much concern for civilians. “Israel provides early warnings to Palestinian Arabs in the forms of texts, phone calls, and roof-knocking (when small munitions are dropped on roofs as a warning to evacuate) and pauses its operations four hours daily,” he wrote. “The IDF provides military maps to civilians to alert them where the military will be operating and drops leaflets to warn Gazans to evacuate.”

To outside observers, advance warnings may look like humanitarianism, but for their recipients they are more often experienced as acts of terror. Notices like Adraee’s are the product of a monumental, intricate, and sophisticated Israeli surveillance program strengthened in close collaboration with the American technology sector. The goal of these warnings is more to flaunt the IDF’s capacity to gather extensive information on potential targets than it is to protect civilians. This fall, the announcements have been a clear means of subjugation in Beirut, paralyzing those of us who live here and suffocating the city and its surroundings.

The surveillance tactics now being unleashed on Lebanon have long been deployed against the people of Palestine. In his 2007 book, Hollow Land, the architect and theorist Eyal Weizman situates Israel’s surveillance system within the broader post-1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. By the early aughts, that system had grown robust enough to give Israel the confidence to pull many ground troops from both territories. In 2005, the IDF withdrew from Gaza, and, throughout the same decade, Israel started to build a wall around the West Bank, even as settlements strategically enveloped and fragmented the region. Surveillance and settlement, Weizman writes, allowed “Israelis to pull out of densely inhabited Palestinian areas under the terms of the Oslo accord while still dominating the Palestinians physically, collectively, and politically by remotely controlling their movements.” That a bureaucratic system of walls, gates, and checkpoints made the occupation more palatable to international observers didn’t hurt.

According to Weizman, Israeli military and intelligence officials studied the work of French post-structuralist scholars like Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, using their critical analysis of systems of subjugation as a guide in devising new approaches to dominating Palestinian spaces. The Israeli general Aviv Kohavi — known for the 2002 brutal massacre in the West Bank’s Balata refugee camp — put Guattari and Deleuze’s theories into practice. Before that operation, Israeli forces had hesitated to enter Palestinian refugee camps, but, under Kohavi, no place was considered impenetrable. “Moving through domestic interiors, this maneuver turned inside to outside and private domains to thoroughfares,” Weizman writes. “Fighting took place within half-demolished living rooms, bedrooms and corridors.” This collapsing of the distinction between public and private space anticipated the way that Israel would continue to see entering its opponents’ most intimate spaces as a military tactic. In 2022, after another deadly raid in Nablus, Kohavi stated, “we will reach every city, neighborhood, house, or basement.” The military’s assault on Gaza this past year has similarly left no city, neighborhood, or house undisturbed.

As technology has advanced, Israel’s surveillance program has grown more insidious. In 2014, 34 IDF veterans signed an open letter to the Israeli government objecting to the fact that “the Palestinian population under military rule is completely exposed to espionage and surveillance by Israeli intelligence.” The letter explained, “While there are severe limitations on the surveillance of Israeli citizens, the Palestinians are not afforded this protection. There’s no distinction between Palestinians who are, and are not, involved in violence.” In 2021, an Irish NGO confirmed that Pegasus, a spying software developed by the Israeli company NSO Group, had been deployed to monitor Palestinians via their cell phones. The Israeli government is known to use Pegasus, which has the capability to track locations, extract text messages and photos, record calls, and film targets through phone cameras. According to Amnesty International, Israel also uses a facial recognition technology called Red Wolf “to track Palestinians and automate harsh restrictions on their freedom of movement.” In Jerusalem alone, the Israeli government had by December 2020 installed at least a thousand cameras to monitor and surveil the everyday movement of Palestinians, while the IDF uses 3D computer models of the West Bank and Gaza to tour targeted buildings digitally before entering them.

Much of Israel’s surveillance program is run by the IDF’s secretive Military Intelligence Directorate, the largest subset of which is the elite Unit 8200. The unit functions as the government’s premier information-gathering and cyber-warfare agency. Yossi Kuperwasser, a former Israeli military intelligence officer, described 8200’s members as some of the “best and brightest personnel in the Israeli military.” In Start-up Nation, the 2009 book that helped bolster Israel’s image as a beacon of technological innovation, Dan Senor and Saul Singer called the unit Israel’s version of “Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.” Tellingly, Avichay Adraee was once a member.

Unit 8200 works closely with other Israeli think tanks and military organizations to conduct sociological research on Israel’s opponents not only in the occupied territories, but abroad as well. In April 2024, the magazine +972 wrote that Israel had used a new A.I.-based system in Gaza called Lavender, supposedly designed by Unit 8200, to “process massive amounts of data to generate thousands of potential ‘targets’ for military strikes.” And the scale of the recent Israeli attacks on Lebanon was facilitated by the IDF’s deep penetration of Hezbollah networks — Unit 8200 has been collecting extensive data on Hezbollah operatives since after the 2006 Lebanon War. In 2020, the government-run Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC) produced a series of detailed reports filled with demographic, socioeconomic, and cultural information on southern Lebanese towns like Bint Jbeil, from which Hezbollah has operated — highlighting Hezbollah’s social welfare network, its major centers of operation, its leaders, and its potential weak points. Much of the infrastructure surveyed in the reports was attacked during the latest Israeli escalation on South Lebanon, including the Martyr Salah Ghandour Hospital.

Unit 8200 also benefits from a close relationship with the American tech sector. A report published in August by the Wall Street Journal described the unit as Silicon Valley’s “hot talent pipeline,” and “an incubator for cybersecurity startups.” Palo Alto Networks, the largest publicly traded cybersecurity-focused company in America, was founded by a Unit 8200 alum. Publicly traded U.S.-based technology companies run by former members of Unit 8200 are cumulatively valued at over $160 billion. And there remains a steady flow of information and capital among the U.S., Israeli intelligence services, and the Israeli tech industry more broadly — a set of relationships that have only been strengthened in the wake of the October 7 attacks. In December 2023, Intel announced that it plans to spend $25 billion on a new chip factory in Israel. That same month, a delegation of 65 U.S.-based investors and executives visited Israel as a show of solidarity. David Siegel, the chief executive of Meetup.com and the co-organizer of the trip, declared, “We will invest and continue to stand with the ‘Start-Up Nation.’” The trip’s other organizer, Ron Miasnik, a principal at Bain Capital Ventures, described the group as being “long-term bullish on Israel.” In January, Palantir’s co-founder and chairman Peter Thiel and CEO Alex Karp traveled to Tel Aviv to enshrine a deal between his company and the Israeli Defense Ministry. Palantir’s then-Executive Vice President Josh Harris said of the arrangement, “Both parties have mutually agreed to harness Palantir’s advanced technology in support of war-related missions.”

It’s hard not to see both Washington, D.C. and Silicon Valley as stakeholders in the Israeli war machine, and it is not a stretch to conceive of Israel’s war on Palestinians and Lebanese as an American war, too. In that context, the concern about civilian casualties performed by American officials and Israel’s spokespeople alike is, in the end, just that: a performance. Israel’s public relations campaigns aim to soothe the consciences of the country’s backers, just as its intelligence-gathering and advance warning systems are designed to dazzle Western audiences and illustrate exceptional levels of both innovation and morality. But on the receiving end of Israel’s technical and military prowess, the attacks do not look remotely restrained, let alone ethically conducted. The consequences are costly, overwhelming, and terrifying.

This fall, Israel has flattened villages and killed, injured, and displaced residents of South Lebanon, the Beqaa, and the southern suburbs of Beirut. For those of us who managed to avoid physical danger, Adraee’s nightly declarations effectively disciplined our minds and bodies, teaching us to conform to the rhythm of his posts. We learned what time to get home at night, to be off the streets before the killing started. Past 10 p.m., an eerie and unfamiliar silence befell Beirut — a city normally so dense and dynamic that, in more peaceful times, it hardly sleeps.

In Gaza, Israeli soldiers have produced a series of widely shared videos in which they parade around with underwear found in the homes of Arab women — a grotesque literalization of the kind of voyeurism that permeates the Israeli surveillance apparatus. Adraee’s announcements evince the detailed knowledge our killers possess about us and our homes, and we then reciprocated this obsession, this sense of familiarity and intimacy — letting Adraee into our bedrooms each night as we frantically checked his page to find out where the next bombs would fall.