A bulletin in its fourth revision, and a problem still unaddressed
On July 3, 2026, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency published Revision 4 of Safety Information Bulletin 2022-02, its standing advisory on GNSS outages and alterations. First issued in March 2022 and now revised for the fourth time — the last update came on July 5, 2024 — the bulletin exists because satellite navigation jamming and spoofing near conflict zones has become routine enough that European regulators felt the need for a living document rather than a one-off warning. The new revision adds pilot-ATC communication procedures, Electronic Flight Bag guidance, and controller capacity measures, and points operators to a webpage tracking affected Flight Information Regions on a rolling 30-day basis.
The 2024 revision named the hotspot list explicitly: FIR Nicosia, Beirut, Damascus, Tel Aviv, Amman, the northeastern corner of Cairo, eastern Athens, Baghdad, Kuwait, Bahrain, northwestern Tehran, and northern Tripoli — a belt running the length of the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East (RNTF summary of the July 2024 EASA bulletin). That is precisely the zone where independent monitoring — Eurocontrol's GNSS interference reporting, the crowdsourced GPSJam.org dataset cited by aviation-safety analysts, and multiple journalistic investigations — has traced a substantial share of the interference to Israeli military electronic-warfare systems operating in the same L-band frequencies civil aircraft rely on for navigation.
What the record shows
The attribution is not a single unverified claim; it is a pattern documented from several independent angles. Israel Airports Authority officials told The Times of Israel in September 2023 that non-stop GPS jamming was forcing aircraft landing at Ben Gurion Airport onto alternate approach paths over West Bank settlements — at the time attributed to "unknown sources," with Russian electronic warfare in Syria one working theory. By April 2024, Breaking Defense reported experts tracing the spreading jamming over southern Lebanon to Israel's own defensive electronic-warfare effort against Hezbollah drone and rocket guidance — "a prudent defensive move," in the words of Secure World Foundation's Brian Weeden, but one with civilian spillover. Lebanon's government has treated the attribution as established enough to act on: its Ministry of Communications filed complaints with the UN and the International Telecommunication Union in March and July 2024 alleging that Israeli jamming disrupted GPS at Beirut's Rafic Hariri International Airport and interfered with Lebanese airspace generally (Middle East Monitor).
The civil aviation consequences have been concrete, not hypothetical. Reporting cited across the aviation press describes a Turkish Airlines flight aborting its approach to Beirut and returning to Turkey after spoofing corrupted its position data, and Opsgroup — the pilot-run flight-safety network — has logged incidents including an aircraft nearly lining up on the wrong runway. Spoofing is the more dangerous failure mode of the two: unlike jamming, which simply blanks a receiver, spoofing feeds a false position, and can corrupt altitude estimates enough to trigger false Ground Proximity Warning alerts — precisely the kind of degraded-mode scenario EASA's bulletin exists to get ahead of.
The steelman for keeping quiet about attribution
EASA's institutional caution here is defensible on its own terms. The agency's mandate is aviation safety, not attribution of military conduct, and a regulator that starts naming states as jammers in a technical safety bulletin risks becoming a vehicle for one belligerent's narrative in an active conflict — undermining the neutral, technocratic credibility that makes airlines and air navigation service providers trust its guidance in the first place. Israel, for its part, has a genuine security interest at stake: GNSS-guided drones and rockets are cheap and precise, and jamming the frequencies they depend on is, as experts quoted above note, a legitimate defensive tool available to any state facing that threat, not an idiosyncratic Israeli practice. Publishing FIR-level interference maps without naming a cause lets operators route around the danger without EASA taking a position on the underlying military dispute.
Where that caution runs out
But safety-bulletin neutrality is not the same as regulatory silence, and it is regulatory silence that is the actual gap. EASA's bulletin describes symptoms; it assigns no state any obligation to deconflict military electronic-warfare emissions from the civil-protected GNSS bands before flooding them across FIRs used by scheduled international traffic. That obligation would ordinarily sit with the jamming state's own spectrum regulator — in Israel's case, the Ministry of Communications, which manages national frequency allocation. No public Israeli spectrum-policy document acknowledges the aviation-safety externality of electronic-warfare use of GNSS-adjacent spectrum, let alone commits to a coordination channel with EASA, Eurocontrol, or neighboring civil aviation authorities. That is the actual policy failure: not that Israel jams, which any state facing precision-guided threats might do, but that no regulator — Israeli or European — has been tasked with reconciling military spectrum use against a civil aviation safety floor.
The fix is narrow and technocratic, not a demand to disarm. A published deconfliction protocol — advance NOTAMs for planned high-intensity jamming windows, a technical liaison channel between Israel's Ministry of Communications and Eurocontrol's GNSS task force, and altitude or geographic bounding of jamming emissions during civil traffic peaks — would let Israel retain its electronic-warfare capability while giving EASA something more useful than a rolling FIR blacklist. Revision 4 shows EASA still managing this as a standing safety hazard four years and four bulletins in. A fifth revision that still only maps symptoms, with no state having accepted responsibility for the emission, would confirm that spectrum diplomacy in this region is not proportionate to the risk it has created.