BEIRUT: Hezbollah urged Lebanese to discard Israeli leaflets dropped over the country’s east on Tuesday, warning against scanning barcodes that it said could compromise personal data.
“The Zionist enemy is dropping leaflets with barcodes in the Bekaa region and may drop them elsewhere,” the Iran-backed group said in a statement.
“Please do not open or circulate the barcode. You must destroy it immediately,” the statement said, warning the code could “take all your information.”
Later Tuesday, a Lebanese security source said an Israeli strike hit Hezbollah’s south Beirut stronghold, with the Israeli army also saying it had carried out a strike, a day after hitting the same area.
Hezbollah and its arch-foe had been exchanging near-daily cross-border fire for nearly a year over the Gaza war.
Since then, Israel has repeatedly broadcast warnings on loudspeakers to residents of southern Lebanon, asking them to evacuate.
On Monday Israel launched devastating strikes across Lebanon’s south and east, killing more than 550 according to Lebanese figures — the deadliest in one day since Hezbollah and Israel last went to war in 2006.
Lebanese official media said on Monday that people were receiving Israeli phone warnings telling them to evacuate, and Information Minister Ziad Makary’s office told AFP it had received one of the messages.
The calls caused panic among Lebanese after devastating week of coordinated communications devices explosions that killed 39 people and wounded thousands on Tuesday and Wednesday last week.
Those were followed by a deadly strike on Friday on south Beirut, with leading Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Aqil among the dead.