Sound as a weapon. It might seem improbable at first, yet in Lebanon, countless residents have lived with the unsettling roar of overhead fighter jets, the persistent hums of drones, and the jarring crash of sonic booms for decades. Families in Beirut halt their daily activities at the faintest tremor, fearing it signalled a fresh wave of conflict. Invisible to the eye yet undeniably felt, sonic warfare has become part of the nation’s collective experience—a psychological assault that can linger long after the skies are clear.
The Hidden Face of Conflict: What is Auditory Warfare?
Auditory warfare, also known as sonic or acoustic warfare, involves the deliberate use of intense or carefully modulated sound to terrify, disorient, and demoralize a target population. As Steve Goodman (2009) highlights, sound has become a calculated instrument of modern conflict. Historically, tactics range from the U.S military’s “psychoacoustic correction” operations – such as blasting loud rock music at the embassy to force Manuel Noriega’s surrender in Panama and deploying speaker-equipped Humvees in the Gulf War– to Israel’s use of sonic “sound bombs’ in Gaza and the 2024 pagers explosions. In Lebanon, Israeli F-15 fighter jets intentionally break the sound barrier at low altitudes over southern cities, producing intense sonic booms– sharp, explosive noises generated when an aircraft exceeds the speed of sound, forming air-compression shock waves. This nonstop assault on civilians’ auditory space may leave few visible scars, yet psychiatrists argue that their long-term psychological impact among communities already scarred by conflict can be just as destructive.
The Systematic Use of Sound Terror
Israel’s resort to sonic booms “is nothing new for citizens of Lebanon”. Recent investigations reveal that Lebanese airspace was subjected to at least 111 sonic booms between October 7th 2023 and August 20th 2024, accompanied by intensified mock raids by F-15 fighter jets and drones ceaselessly buzzing over southern areas Beirut, the Bekaa Valley, all the way to northeast Keserwan. These incursions are neither fleeting nor minor. On average, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) spends more than four and a half hours circling the Lebanese skies, and Lebanon’s basic air defenses stand little chance against such advanced military aircraft.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, filmmaker behind The Diary of a Sky (2024) and founder of the non-profit audio-analysis organisation Earshot that tracks human rights abuses and state violence views these sonic booms as deliberate psychological warfare. Drawing on 243 formal complaints to the UN Security Council, data from the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) peacekeepers and the Lebanese army, he records that since the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war, Israeli military aircrafts have violated Lebanese airspace over 22,355 times, including 2,000 incursions in 2020 alone.
Beirut resident Nayla Kombarji vividly describes the terror:
“It sounds like the plane is about to crash into you, and then there’s a boom that feels like a real explosion. The whole building shakes. My body shakes. Some days they’re back-to-back, like six in one hour. They’ve been flying really low. It’s terrifying.”
The uncertainty between each sonic blast is equally distressing, as the anticipation of the next attack heightens anxiety in an already traumatized population, still recovering from the catastrophic 2020 Beirut Port explosion.
Abu Hamdan argues these sonic booms serve as an “acoustic reminder that [Israel] can turn Lebanon into Gaza at any point”, intensified by growing tensions with Hezbollah. His documentary captures villagers recounting sleepless weeks, haunted by aircraft noise they could neither see nor escape, like the air itself was war. Considering an F-15’s acoustic footprint covers nearly 500 square kilometers and Lebanon’s maximum width is just 88 kilometers, these sonic incursions resonate across the entire country, amplified by its mountainous geography, stretching what might be a fleeting moment of terror elsewhere into minutes of echo-laden dread.
Living Under a Hostile Sky: The Psychological Toll of Sonic Warfare
Invisible yet profoundly invasive, auditory warfare is rarely confined to a single moment in time, reverberating into every aspect of daily life. Unlike the immediate devastation caused by conventional warfare, sonic booms, airrstrikes and surveillance drones disrupt mundane routines. Systematic reviews show that in Lebanon, sending children to school or commuting to work becomes filled with persistent anxiety, dread, and hypervigilance. Dr. Lara Sheehi emphasizes the unsettling normalization of these events, noting that Lebanese children born after the 2006 war “are raised on the notion that the buzzing of drones, the sound barrier breaches, and the constant jet incursions are normal”. Similarly, journalist Nour Sleiman recounts how her 11-year-old sister can accurately gauge aircraft proximity by sound alone, illustrating how deeply ingrained this threat perception has become.
According to Dr. Sheehi, traditional Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) models fall short in a context where threat is never fully absent. In an interview with L’Orient Today, psychiatrist Dr. Georges Karam of IDRAAC, a Lebanese NGO dedicated to mental health, emphasizes that each explosion triggers a fight-or-flight response, flooding the body with excessive cortisol. Overtime, this leads to headaches, hypertension, muscle pain, chronic stress, and sleep deprivation, which, in addition to the economic pressures the country has been grappling with for years, serves as tool of psychological torture.
“Even hearing a door slam can feel like a bomb,” explains trauma expert Safa, transforming everyday noises into possible trauma triggers. Beirut-based psychologist Yara Naufal desribes patients re-living the 2020 port explosion upon hearing a sonic boom.
Socioeconomic disparities further amplify these impacts. While wealthier families can afford soundproofing or relocation, economically disadvantaged communities face relentless exposure without viable protection. When sound is weaponized, does deliberately targeting vulnerable populations amount to collective punishment?
As international attention continues to overlook this silent dimension of conflict, perhaps the most troubling reality emerges: the deepest wounds inflicted by modern warfare are not always visible or audible—they are quietly and persistently endured.
Protective Measures and Enduring Resilience
In the face of relentless sonic disruption, broken windows and collapsed ceilings, Lebanese civilians have adopted pragmatic forms of self-protection. Youssef Fawzi Azzam, head of the Building Safety Network, issued guidance to Lebanese citizens to mitigate injuries during sonic booms, such as keeping windows slightly ajar to reduce pressure, reinforcing cracked ceilings, and securing household fixtures. He also stressed the importance of “psychological preparation” for children, by explaining sonic booms “scientifically”. Not merely about survival, these safety measures signal a deeper, collective resilience. “What is very rarely spoken of is the fortitude the Lebanese people have developed over the years to Israel’s sonic warfare,” notes Lebanese analyst Nasser Elamine. “The ways in which they’ve learned to cope with these attempts to break their spirit”.
Is Sonic Warfare Beyond Accountability?
Despite growing evidence, prosecuting Israel for sonic warfare remains a legal gray zone. Lebanon has repeatedly condemned the tactic as a form of collective punishment, prohibited under Article 33 of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War. Sonic booms also violate Lebanon’s sovereignty under the Convention on International Civil Aviation—ratified by both Israel and Lebanon—which grants states full control over their airspace.
Yet Israeli aircraft have breached Lebanese airspace over 22,000 times since 2006, a violation of UNSC resolution 1701’s Blue Line, adopted after the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war as “a key to peace in the region”, intended as a temporary demilitarized line.
The legal ambiguity stems from a deeper structural flaw: most frameworks of international humanitarian law focus on visible harm– demolition, injury, physical displacement. Legal scholar Allen Roth emphasized that the sonic boom shares the explosive characteristics of conventional attacks: abrupt energy release, acoustic shock, and psychological disturbance. However, because they leave no rubble, intangible injuries like chronic insomnia, trauma, or panic attacks remain legally under-acknowledged and hard to litigate.
According to Amnesty International, military actors frequently exploit this regulatory blind spot and invoke “operational necessity” or intelligence-gathering missions to deflect accountability. Meanwhile, civilians are left to prove the improvable: that their insomnia, stress, and emotional exhaustion are direct consequences of assaults they can’t see but acutely feel.
Yet where law remains mostly silent, artists, mental health professionals, and researchers like Lawrence Abu Hamdan are working to fill the gaps, where even silence carries the memory of fear, this growing archive of auditory evidence forces us to reconsider the boundaries of war and accountability.
Echoes made visible
Public awareness of auditory warfare is no longer confined to military reports or legal briefings. Artists, researchers, and citizen-led platforms are determined to make the invisible impossible to ignore. In Lebanon, Lawrence Abu Hamdan has built a searchable, interactive database tracking Israel’s aerial violations not as scattered incidents, but as “one long accumulated crime.” Working alongside collectives like Radio al Hara and Forensic Architecture, Abu Hamdan weaves together art and data to expose an “ecology of fear” and counter security narratives. More than archives, these projects are acts of resistance, disrupting dominant narratives and insisting that psychological warfare leaves real, measurable scars in living rooms, classrooms, and hospital wards. In a region too often silenced by fatigue or geopolitics, they remind us that conflict does not end when the bombs stop falling. Sometimes, it just changes frequency.
Listening Beyond the Silence
Lebanon’s experience underscores that contemporary warfare reaches beyond visible destruction. Sonic warfare’s invisible wounds reverberate through homes, communities, and across generations. As international communities rethink conflict and aid, addressing the unseen yet profoundly felt impact of sound-based violence is not merely a humanitarian necessity but a moral imperative.
This silent siege demands global attention, acknowledgment, and action—for Lebanon, and for all communities subjected to warfare’s unheard traumas.
