When Speeches Become Signals: The Ethics of Broadcasting War into Phones and Streets

I watched the footage and read the reporting with a growing, uncomfortable clarity: modern conflict now routinely uses the intimate technology of everyday life as a front line. Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed the U.N.; within hours reports said the same address was rebroadcast — by loudspeaker and even over phones — into Gaza, aimed at hostages and armed groups alike. Officials framed it as a message and pressure instrument. Others see it as psychological warfare; some see a humanitarian blind spot. Netanyahu says Gaza loudspeakers, phones used to transmit UN speech to Hamas, hostages (Haaretz). I also watched his address at the U.N. via the CBS clip provided Netanyahu speaks at the United Nations General Assembly (CBS).

This struck a chord in me not just as another news item, but as a moral and technological knot we’ve been tying tighter for years: what happens when the instruments of communication — phones, loudspeakers, networks we think of as private — are repurposed as instruments of state power in contested spaces? The Times of Israel reported that the IDF planned to broadcast the UN address across the Gaza Strip, a striking example of that repurposing IDF ordered to broadcast Netanyahu’s UN speech to residents of Gaza Strip (The Times of Israel).

Why this matters to me — and should matter to anyone who cares about rights, dignity and the future of democratic norms — can be grouped into three overlapping concerns.

1) The weaponization of intimacy

Phones are intimate devices. They hold our photos, our private conversations, our last messages to loved ones. To have a state broadcast into those devices — especially in a war zone where people are terrified, displaced, and in many cases grieving or hungry — is to blur the line between public diplomacy and direct psychological pressure. It changes the relationship citizens have with their own devices. When the message is aimed at hostages or their captors, the calculus becomes even more fraught: it is communication, yes, but it is also coercion.

2) The asymmetry between messaging and protection

Any state will argue it must communicate strategy, warnings, or leverage public opinion. But broadcasting into a besieged population where the infrastructure for safety is collapsing risks turning communication into a one-way funnel of power. The same technologies that enable a leader to make a global argument at the U.N. can become tools that heighten fear, undermine consent, and expose civilians to harm. Reports of Microsoft and others restricting services that could enable surveillance during this conflict point to a wider, uncomfortable truth: technologies can be dual-use, and corporate policy is suddenly a strategic front (Microsoft disables some services to Israel’s Defense Ministry (NY Times)).

3) The humanitarian and legal fog

Broadcasting a political speech into an active conflict zone sits in a grey area. Is it protected speech? Is it lawful psychological operations under the laws of armed conflict? What obligations does a government have to avoid exacerbating civilian suffering when it exercises this power? The human beings on the receiving end — not just combatants, but displaced families, hospital patients, and hostages — are the ones who bear the consequences.

A few personal reflections follow.

First, technology amplifies state will. I’ve long written about how communications — from the mundane to the strategic — shape outcomes. Years ago I commented on how governments and institutions use messages to influence perceptions and action; seeing a speech cross borders and devices in realtime is the modern continuation of that observation (Email Alerts to our Ambassadors). That earlier instinct — that messages matter, and that channels can be repurposed rapidly — feels validated in this moment.

Second, there is a privacy and dignity dimension that we too often dismiss in crises. I once wrote — perhaps curtly — about public figures and privacy, but the principle is wider: even in war, ordinary people have claims on their private spaces. A broadcast pressed into an occupied population’s phones is an intrusion. It forces me to ask whether our collective focus on technological capability has outpaced our ethical imagination. The tension between necessity and proportionality matters here.

Third, the human tragedy at the core must not be reduced to a debate about technique. Hostages, civilians, and displaced persons are not just targets of messaging; they are lives. My prior writings about humanitarian strains — about shelters filling and societies buckling under migration pressures — remind me that mass suffering changes the moral arithmetic of any state act (New York's shelters running out of room as migrant crisis hits breaking point). Whether in Gaza or New York, when people are vulnerable, we must think twice about how our tools are used.

Finally, there is a broader civic lesson. Democracies and their leaders must be judged not only by what they can do, but by whether they should do it. Broadcasting a speech into another polity’s streets and phones may score political points at home or in the U.N., but it also sets precedents. If states normalize intrusion into civilians’ communications when it suits them, the norms protecting noncombatants will erode further.

I don’t pretend to have an easy answer. In moments of war, choices are grim and messy. But I do know this: technology is neither neutral nor inevitable. It carries values. Every time a speech becomes a signal pressed into the quiet of someone’s phone, we lose a little more of the distance between state power and private life.

That is a conversation worth having — urgently, and across borders.

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Regards,
Hemen Parekh