‘Paging Hezbollah’: The Inside Story of Israel’s 2024 Pager Operation Comes to the Big Screen

Adaugă-ne ca sursă preferată în Google Urmărește-ne pe Google News

A new documentary directed by Justin Folk explores the years-long Israeli operation that infiltrated Hezbollah’s supply chains and culminated in the 2024 explosions targeting thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by members of the terrorist organization.

A new documentary directed by Justin Folk explores the years-long Israeli operation that infiltrated Hezbollah’s supply chains and culminated in the simultaneous detonation of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by members of the terrorist organization in September 2024.

At around 3:30 p.m. local time on September 17, 2024, thousands of pagers carried by Hezbollah members across Lebanon and parts of Syria received what appeared to be a message from the group’s leadership. Moments later, after a brief beep, the devices exploded almost simultaneously.

The following day, another wave of explosions targeted Hezbollah members using walkie-talkies, turning what had initially appeared to be a highly unusual attack into one of the most closely watched operations of the conflict.

Hezbollah had increasingly relied on pagers and other low-tech communication devices after its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, warned members that mobile phones could be tracked.

The pagers involved in the September 2024 attack were reportedly part of a new batch ordered from Taiwan-based Gold Apollo. Officials said explosives had been secretly inserted into the devices before they reached Lebanon.

The explosions killed dozens of Hezbollah members and wounded thousands of others. Many of the injuries involved the hands, face and eyes. Iran’s ambassador to Hezbollah was also among those injured.

But the operation was not the result of a plan put together in a matter of weeks or months. According to the documentary, it was the culmination of a years-long effort to penetrate Hezbollah’s supply chains and exploit the organization’s reliance on communication equipment it believed was safe.

The new documentary, “Paging Hezbollah,” directed by Justin Folk, examines how that operation was developed and carried out and takes viewers behind the scenes of the planning, engineering and deception involved.

The film presents the operation as an attempt to strike Hezbollah while limiting the risk to civilians, amid the organization’s extensive presence in populated areas.

According to the film’s account, Israeli planners understood that Hezbollah operated within ordinary communities, making a conventional attack potentially far more destructive to civilians.

That made the infiltration of Hezbollah’s communications network particularly important. The group’s decision to move away from smartphones and toward pagers and walkie-talkies created an opportunity that Israeli intelligence could exploit.

Rather than simply targeting the devices after they had reached Hezbollah, the operation involved infiltrating the supply chain itself. The documentary follows the process from the engineering of the devices to the efforts to convince Hezbollah to acquire and use technology it believed was secure.

“Paging Hezbollah” includes interviews with senior figures connected to the operation and the broader conflict.

Among those featured are Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former CIA Director General David Petraeus, former Mossad Director David Barnea and former Israel Defense Forces Intelligence Corps member Sarit Zehavi.

The documentary describes the pager operation as a project that had been in development for approximately 15 years. The October 7, 2023, terrorist attacks and the subsequent war with Hezbollah added further urgency to an operation that had already been years in the making.

Justin Folk combines archival material and news footage with dramatic reenactments and interviews. The 93-minute film also includes accounts from survivors of the October 7 attacks and the sister of a victim of the July 27, 2024, Hezbollah missile attack on Majdal Shams, a Druze town in the Golan Heights.

Near the end of the documentary, Netanyahu addresses what he sees as the wider significance of the conflic.

„The test of Western civilization is now, in Israel,” he said. „Because Israel is fighting the forces that will destroy Western civilization and Western freedom.”

Justin Folk said he goal of the documentary was to explain how an operation that initially seemed almost impossible was actually developed over many years.

„Many people heard about the pager operation and wondered how it was even possible”, said director Justin Folk.

„We wanted to tell the actual inside story, years of patience, engineering, deception and tradecraft that seem more like fiction than fact. We aimed to make the film of record for the operation, so we went right to the source. The deeper we went, the more incredible the real story became.”

The film also seeks to place the pager operation within the broader history of the confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah, focusing not only on the explosions themselves but on the intelligence work, technological development and deception that preceded them.

Justin Folk said the documentary was designed to provide an account of the operation based on interviews with people directly connected to the events, rather than focusing solely on the dramatic images that emerged after the explosions.

The documentary is scheduled to open in theaters across the United States on October 30.