How Israel occupies the sky. Sound can terrorize the population, but also expose war criminals.

Bzzz, a buzzing Israeli drone hovered above me as I went to the art center in Beirut at the end of last year for a conference on sonic investigations. A surveillance drone is hard to spot, it usually flies very high. On days when it is present over the city, everyone nearby can hear it. At that time, it was roughly two days a week. 

Explosions echoed off buildings and came from different directions. It was impossible to determine how far or close the danger was. This acoustic disorientation increases the feeling of vulnerability.

At the end of last year, there was talk about war with expectations of when it would come again. Some expected it immediately after the New Year, but it was ultimately renewed on a larger scale at the beginning of March. For residents of southern Lebanon, it was more about an increase in intensity – since 2024, the war has never really ended there. Israel formally declared a ceasefire in November 2024, but it was regularly violated. During bombings especially in southern Lebanon at least 300 people were killed.

On Sunday, March 1, it was the first time Hezbollah fired rockets at the Zionist state after the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Iran. Since then, Israel has issued evacuation orders to all villages and towns south of the Litani River and the southern parts of Beirut, and launched a ground invasion. According to the UN, it has displaced nearly 700,000 people and killed 84 children.

Israeli sound harassment

“Darkness is with us. Fear and anxiety eat with us. The unknown eats with us. F16s eat with us. Drones and their operators somewhere in Israel eat with us,” writes Palestinian author Atef Abu Saif in the book Drone Eats With Me, which he wrote during the Gaza war in 2014. During the current genocide, the sound impact of war has reached new dimensions. Israeli drones created a permanent soundscape that has become part of everyday life.

The Gazans and Gazans call the constant sound zanana. The drone buzzing also inspired this now worldwide hit, which was created during the genocide and has since been remixed by countless musicians. Residents of Gaza filmed humorous videos during so-called ceasefire periods about how they suddenly cannot sleep without the constant drone sound. 

The sound has a unique property: it cannot be avoided. We can close our eyes, but we cannot stop hearing. The sound penetrates walls, bodies, and the nervous system. Vibrations pass through matter. Listening is involuntary. This property makes sound an ideal tool for atmospheric occupation. Israeli military aircraft have violated Lebanese airspace more than 22,000 times in the past 16 years. The website AirPressure.info has compiled these incidents into a publicly accessible, interactive database that allows tracking the extent of these violations. Since 2007, 8,297 fighter jets and 13,203 drones have been recorded, with individual flights lasting an average of 3 hours and 17 minutes. The total time they have been in the air corresponds to 3,114 days, or about 8.5 years of continuous occupation of the sky. The constant noise of aircraft and drones creates an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear in Lebanon, as the threat of airstrikes is a daily reality for residents.

As in Gaza, people in Lebanon are seeking ways to resist sound harassment. A Lebanese teenager runs a popular TikTok account called Jidar l Sot (sonic crash) where he remixes each explosion, for example, by slowing down or playing backwards. There is a website Have you heard something?, where people can rate explosions with reviews. “In the south, Lebanese even have nicknames [for Israeli drones and planes], and when their engines are heard, they respond with mockery and jokes, for example, ‘Stop and have tea with us.’ Meanwhile, Israeli warning messages, broadcast at night from drones hovering near civilian buildings, are drowned out by chants,” explains researcher Nasser Elamine in the article The New Arab.

Evidence from recordings

But sound is not only a tool of violence but also a means of documenting it. Organizations like Earshot use sound analysis to investigate human rights violations. Audio recordings can reveal the type of weapon used, the distance of the attack, or the timing of the event. Sound thus becomes forensic media — evidence that cannot be easily denied.

On January 29, 2024, six-year-old Hind Rajab called from a car riddled with bullets in Gaza, desperately asking rescuers for help. She was hiding with her family in the car while trying to escape the Israeli invasion. Two weeks later, she was found dead along with six family members; nearby was a destroyed ambulance with two paramedics who had come to save her. Earshot, in collaboration with Forensic Architecture, analyzed the audio recording of the call, especially the six seconds during which her fifteen-year-old cousin Lajan Hamada was killed.

Ballistic analysis revealed 64 gunshots fired within six seconds at a rate consistent with weapons used by the Israeli army, not the rifles attributed to Palestinian armed groups, writes Earshot in the investigation. Based on the time difference between the projectile sound and the gunshot, it was determined that the shooter was only 13 to 23 meters away, probably in a Merkava tank, which is confirmed by Lajan’s last words: “They’re shooting at us, the tank is next to me.” Such proximity means the tank crew must have seen that they were shooting at a civilian vehicle with children.

Here, sound became a key forensic evidence that helped reconstruct the circumstances of their killing. A documentary about the circumstances of Hind Rajab’s and her relatives’ deaths received an acclaimed 23-minute standing ovation after its Venice Festival premiere. The film will be screened in Prague this week at the One World festival. 

Echoes of genocides

Academic Gascia Ouzounian dedicated her research to sonic memories of the Turkish genocide in Armenia at the beginning of the 20th century. Survivors of genocide often describe their experience not through images but through sounds. Many had to hide and could not see what was happening around them. Their primary experience was listening: gunshots, screams, crying, commands, singing. Sonic memories became the main form of remembrance. Survivors describe how certain sounds remain as unwanted echoes “in their ears” for decades.

Armenian survivor Shogher Tonoyan recalled a “joyful song” sung by perpetrators while her family was burning alive. This song was not just a backdrop to violence – it was part of it. It boosted the killers’ morale and became a sonic imprint of trauma that persisted throughout her life. Sound functions here as a tool of power – gunfire induced terror, music signaled dominance, and voices of authorities organized deportations.

At the same time, sound also preserves the voices of victims, their cries for help, wails, and collective singing, which allowed sharing pain and passing on the memory of genocide despite its denial, thus carrying testimony of suffering. Listening to sonic memories from genocides like in Gaza brings us closer to understanding that the trauma of genocide does not only persist in historical records but continues to resonate in the bodies and memories of those forced to listen.

Sound as a bearer of trauma

Not only past wars but also the explosion in Beirut’s port in 2020, the largest non-military explosion in urban environment, left scars on survivors. Many Lebanese today exhibit hypersensitivity to sound – a symptom characteristic of post-traumatic stress disorder. Even a simple door slam can trigger a panic response. Sound becomes a trigger for the return of trauma. Here, sound functions as a form of collective punishment. It does not kill directly but produces permanent psychological pressure.

Israel often uses so-called acoustic bombs. Supersonic aircraft produce a sound resembling thunder. People exposed to this sound may mistake it for a real missile with devastating impact. Sonic bombs violate Lebanon’s territorial sovereignty and are in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, adopted after the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war. They are also considered a form of collective punishment, in accordance with the Geneva Convention on the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (which in Article 33 prohibits deliberate intimidation of civilians).

Lebanese researcher Mhamad Safa is currently studying sound trauma. For a trained architect and sound producer from Lebanon, it was a logical extension of his field of interest. Sound trauma does not only occur at the moment of explosion or loud noise but develops over time as so-called “aftersound” or “sonic aftershock.” Safa’s research is based on his experiences with post-war reconstruction in Beirut, where he noticed that workers were exposed to extreme noise without protection, compensation, or legal safeguards. This shows that exposure to noise is also a matter of power and social inequality. 

Safa investigates how the city during wartime acts as an amplifier of violence. Sound is not neutral. It is shaped by architecture, urbanism, and materials. Buildings reflect, amplify, and distort sound waves. During bombings in Beirut, witnesses described disorientation caused by the inability to localize the source of sound. Explosions echoed off buildings and came from different directions. It was impossible to determine how far or close the danger was. This acoustic disorientation increases the feeling of vulnerability. Evolutionarily, we depend on our ability to localize sound to respond to threats. When this ability fails, intense anxiety arises. Low-frequency explosions and shockwaves spread unpredictably, reflect off buildings, and make the city a kind of amplifier of violence. The wartime environment forces residents into constant vigilance (“hyperlistening”), because listening is key to survival.

Sound thus becomes a form of violence from which one cannot escape, as it penetrates the body and space. Acoustic trauma is thus long-term, spatially conditioned, and deeply bodily consequence of war. That is why Mhamad Safa, in an interview, explains that sound should be included among collateral damages under international law. After the interview, which I attended, he admitted that international law rules will probably be rewritten very soon. The current Israeli-American attacks, which are indefensible under international law, support his view. 

The author is a journalist.