New website maps severe GPS disruptions in eastern Med ■ Aviation watchdog blames drone warfare ■ IDF: ‘We are acting in a range of ways, others also defending themselves’ ■ Russia deployed similar system in Syria

The skies over the eastern Mediterranean region, including Israel, are a hotspot of GPS jamming, new publicly available data shows. The GPS interference is felt mostly along Turkey’s southern coast, Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus and Israel. In past occurrences, it was thought that Russian military systems in Syria were the cause of the disruptions, but it is also possible that Israeli systems have contributed to the effect too.

The jamming of the satellite-based Global Positioning System has increased recently, three years after the phenomenon first appeared in the region. The disruptions mostly affect passenger planes, and not ground-based systems in vehicles. The European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation said it is likely that the jamming comes from the use of anti-drone systems.

Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz recently confirmed that Israel and its neighbors have established a regional air defense alliance that has already led to the “prevention of Iranian attempts to challenge Israel and other countries in the Middle East.” During a session of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Gantz said the air defense alliance deals with “Iran’s attempts to attack the countries of the region using rockets, cruise missiles and drones.”

In response to a query from Haaretz as to whether Israel operates various means to jam GPS systems to prevent Iranian drone attacks, the IDF said it “acts in a number of dimensions against diverse threats on all fronts. There are many other groups in the region that act in a variety of ways to defend themselves, along with Israel.”

GPS devices – in cell phones, on a plane, ship or car – receive simultaneous signals from several satellites to triangulate and calculate their own exact position. It’s hard to overstate the importance of such technology, which has many uses, both military and civilian – and in particular for weapons systems.

Two main methods of GPS disruption exist: Jamming and spoofing. A hostile actor that wants to disrupt the proper and continuous functioning of GPS receivers can broadcast a strong signal on the relevant bandwidth, flood it and block the device from receiving the satellite signals – thus interfering with its proper functioning.

In spoofing, the hostile actor broadcasts signals simulating the authentic satellite signal – which causes the receiver to lock onto the hostile transmitter instead of the satellite. The hostile transmitter then “feeds” the GPS receiver with false time and location data, causing it to miscalculate its location. It then displays this wrong location to the pilot or ship’s captain. The deviation from the real location can reach tens of kilometers, and could cause a ship’s captain to mistakenly change course.

GPS interference usually results from military causes, out of the desire of some group to protect strategic sites – for example, the Kremlin, airports or a forward base in Syria – from GPS-guided precision munitions, such as drones or cruise missiles. A comprehensive report from 2019, exposed thousands of incidents of GPS spoofing by Russia. Iran also took similar steps – a sort of marine cyber attack – to take over a British ship in the Persian Gulf.

In June 2019, the Israel Airports Authority announced for the first time interference with GPS systems in Israeli airspace, after numerous complaints from pilots landing at Ben-Gurion International Airport. “Two things are felt in the cockpit. The first is ‘plain jamming,’ a drop in the accuracy of the plane’s navigation,” an El Al captain told Haaretz at the time. “Recently, a sort of ‘hijacking’ of the signal began too and then the plane ‘appears’ in a different place. It’s not dangerous, but it’s annoying. I once came in to land at Ben Gurion Airport and suddenly received a warning of being close to the ground because the GPS thought I was over the Jerusalem Hills,” added the captain.

Here’s what it looked like in real time: A Qatari plane taking off from Amman to Doha experienced such severe jamming, that its on-board GPS system showed it was flying west, over Israel’s coast. An EasyJet that departed Tel Aviv heading west, to London, showed false data positioning it over the Dimona nuclear reactor in southern Israel.

After three months, the Airports Authority announced that the disruptions had ended, and lifted the warning to pilots. Defense officials concluded at the time that Russia was operating electronic warfare systems in Syria to prevent drone attacks on their base in Latakia – and this affected aviation in Israeli airspace too. “If you try to interfere with a plane landing in one place, it interferes with a plane landing somewhere else,” the commander of the Spectrum Warfare Unit of the IDF told Israeli public broadcaster this year, concerning the actor behind the GPS jamming, when it re-surfaced in the region.

A new website now offers daily visualization of global GPS jamming, based on airplanes’ own automated reporting. Most civilian airplanes in the world have begun using in recent years the ADS-B system, to enhance aviation safety, broadcasting their identity, precise location, altitude, heading and speed to air traffic control and other planes around. This data is also received by aviation enthusiasts on the ground, and they are the ones feeding an ever-growing number of flight tracking websites.

The planes broadcast additional data, including their GPS systems’ accuracy levels. John Wiseman, a Walt Disney R&D Imagineer and aviation fan, has interfaced with one of those tracking websites to display the reported accuracy of airborne GPS systems all over the world. The maps show where planes suffer from severe, moderate or no jamming at all.

What pops out immediately are regions experiencing regular GPS jamming – the eastern basin of the Mediterranean Sea, Libya, Kurdistan and the Caucasus, Ankara and Istanbul, and Moscow and St. Petersburg. Wiseman says the most common cause for the degradation in accuracy is jamming by military systems in conflict zones, as well as the testing of “military jamming systems (common in the southwestern United States)” and “jamming systems used to protect Russian oligarchs from drones.”

A report from the Center for Advanced Defense Studies research organization revealed intensive Russian GPS interference, including thousands of cases of spoofing the location of civilian ships. The navigation systems reported that ships were seemingly at the center of a distant airport, which was a side effect of the Russian attempt to deceive civilian drones and protect the airport from drone attacks. This also revealed the jamming around Russian government facilities, President Putin’s Black Sea palace, and Russia’s base in Syria, as well as tactical spoofing conducted by the units responsible for Putin’s personal security – for example when he visited the Crimean Peninsula.

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Eurocontrol, the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation, says the main cause for the steep rise in GPS jamming in the eastern Mediterranean basin is military systems thwarting drone attacks. This correlates with Russia’s deployment of jamming systems to protect its base from Syrian rebels’ drone attacks, as well as reports that Israel is currently dealing – using various means and allies – with the Iranian drone threat. Which makes it possible that some of the disruptions are caused by similar Israeli systems.

Israel’s civil aviation authority publishes from time to time NOTAMs (notice to airmen) warning of GPS disruptions at specific hours on specific future dates. How would Israeli authorities know this in advance if Israel weren’t somehow involved?

Read this story in Hebrew: שיבושי ג'י-פי-אס חריפים מתועדים בשמי ישראל. החשוד המיידי: נשק נגד מל"טים

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