Paging Hezbollah

Paging Hezbollah is a 2026 documentary directed by Justin Folk (runtime 1 hour 33 minutes, rated PG-13) that chronicles the full arc of the Mossad supply-chain operation that culminated on September 17, 2024, when approximately 5,000 booby-trapped pagers simultaneously exploded across Lebanon and Syria, killing at least 12 people and injuring nearly 3,000 Hezbollah members. The film traces the decades-long conflict between Israel and Hezbollah—beginning with Mossad's origins in the 1940s—before zeroing in on how the specific pager operation was conceived, engineered, and executed. The cabinet first heard the proposal in October 2023; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu initially rejected it before eventually approving what became a multi-year covert effort. Mossad constructed an elaborate network of front companies—shell corporations registered in Hungary and Hong Kong—and secured a manufacturing license from a Taiwanese pager maker. The target device was the AR-924 model; each unit's lithium-ion battery pack was secretly fitted with a 6-gram layer of PETN plastic explosive paired with a metal-free detonator strip engineered to evade standard security scanners. Devices were priced and marketed specifically to attract Hezbollah procurement rather than civilian buyers. Before the operation could execute, Israel had to neutralize two serious exposure risks: an increasingly suspicious Hezbollah internal-security figure was eliminated in August 2024, and Iranian X-ray scanning equipment bound for Lebanon—which could have detected the embedded explosives—was bombed in mid-September 2024. When the signal was finally sent, the simultaneous detonations shattered Hezbollah's communications network and command structure in a single coordinated moment. The film features on-camera interviews with Netanyahu, former Mossad chief David Barnea, then-IDF Northern Command chief Major General Ori Gordin, former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, former Israeli National Security Council chief Yaakov Nagel, Hezbollah expert and former U.S. intelligence official Matthew Levitt, and former Israeli intelligence official Sarit Zehavi. The documentary presents itself as both a history of Israeli intelligence and an espionage thriller, framing the pager attack as the most consequential supply-chain intelligence operation in modern history. Note: some Israeli commentators raised questions about whether the film's release days after the Israeli election constituted political messaging, a controversy the film does not directly address.

Sources: The Media Line, NewsNation, Ynetnews, Times of Israel, Breitbart, JFeed, Web search aggregation