BEIRUT — A Twitter user named Mahmoud tweeted on March 6: “Hostile warplanes flying in the southern airspace of Beirut at medium altitude.” Two years before Mahmoud’s tweet, on April 27, 2020, another user named Hussin tweeted: “Hostile warplanes carry out mock raids at low levels in Lebanese airspace.”

Lebanese citizens have become accustomets to foreign aircraft -- especially warplanes from Israel. New research has shown that over the past 15 years alone, at least 22,000 Israeli overflights have been documented over Lebanese airspace. The website Airpressure.info shows many details regarding these flights — for example, type of aircraft, duration of the flight, routes.

Based on 243 letters from 2006 to 2021 addressed by Lebanon to the UN Security Council, Beirut-based investigator Lawrence Abu Hamdan launched this investigation supported by the research project ARS Art-Research-Sound from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Abu Hamdan put together all the information from these letters in order to show a very alarming pattern. “When I found that, I felt that this data needed to be seen and done in a place where it was interactive and searchable, where patterns could be understood,” he told Al-Monitor.

“We have come to accept this as part of our everyday reality, but we are not really asking many questions about it,” he added.