‘Paging Hezbollah’ Thrillingly Recounts a Mossad Masterstroke

On September 17, 2024, Mossad agents in Israel, under the direction of Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, activated a secret switch at 3:30 PM. The switch sent a signal to pagers, each containing a small payload of explosive previously implanted by Mossad, and detonated them. The pagers were held by thousands of members of Hezbollah, a terrorist proxy group heavily funded by the Iranian regime. The pagers had reached Hezbollah’s Lebanese Shia Islamist terrorists through a sophisticated, years-long Mossad operation involving a fictious shell company.What happened next sent shockwaves through the Middle East, forever shifting the momentum of Iran’s proxy war with Israel. Approximately 3000 of the pagers exploded, killing twelve and injuring many others. It was a brutally efficient tactical punch that took out key operatives and crippled communications, all while instigating a mass panic and demoralization. Iran’s most powerful terror proxy was humbled. Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, would be taken out only ten days later via bombardment in Beirut. His entire senior command structure perished with him. “Paging Hezbollah,” a documentary that opens today, tells the story of this most extraordinary intelligence operation. This film comprehensively answers questions relating to the operation, the most pressing one being “how on earth did they do it?” More importantly, it places the operation within the larger context of Israel’s ongoing six front war against a host of terrorist proxies. For viewers who may only be slightly familiar with the dynamics of the conflict, this fast-paced, intelligently produced film serves as an engaging primer. Viewers looking for neutrality or the tiresome “both-sideism,” to be found in other documentaries, can look elsewhere. This is an unabashedly pro-Israel, pro Mossad film, depicting the operation through the lens of Israeli sovereignty and Israel’s right to self defense. Indeed, Israel’s Likud prime minister Bibi Netanyahu is one of the film’s main stars, giving his own first-hand accounts of the operation’s evolutionary nuances. Neither were any Hezbollah members consulted or spoken to, as to be expected. Looking at the film’s contextualizing footage, it is easy to understand why. Hezbollah is one of the most destructive terror organizations of the last thirty-five years. Aside from their continuous campaign of suicide bombings and rocket launches towards Israelis, Hezbollah has attacked America on several occasions. They were behind the 1983 bombing of the American embassy in Beirut, resulting in the deaths of 63 people, including 17 Americans, as well as the infamous Marine Barracks bombing that same year. That attack killed 241 American service members, the largest single-day loss of life for the Marine Corps since Iwo Jima. Then there was also the infamous hijacking of TWA flight 847, resulting in the death of US Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem. These American losses pale in comparison, however, to the continuous war of attrition waged by Hezbollah against Israel via its Northern border. This included a continuous barrage of rockets that started in 2023 on October 8, (the day after Hamas’s October 7 attack from Gaza), firing over 8000 rockets and displacing 60,000 Israelis from their homes. That barrage also tragically killed 12 Druze children at a soccer field at Majdal Shams. The pager operation, when combined with other surgical assassination strikes, is what largely put an end to this proxy bombardment. A mix of experts, combined with acted re-enactment sequences, quickly fill aspects of the background of the conflict and its dramatic deployment. We hear from the Director of Mossad, from 2021-2026, David Barnea. There is also insight from the head of the I.D.F. Northern Command, Major General Ori Gordin, and of course, Benjamin Netanyahu. We also hear from varied civilian voices such as journalist Yossef Haddad, and director at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Matthew Levitt. The controversial head of the Iraq counterinsurgency under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, General David Petraeus, also weighs in.Altogether these testimonies paint a picture of Mossad as a tough and seasoned crew dedicated to defending the only progressive democratic nation in the Middle East, one that needs to be defended with exceptional bluntness. As former Mossad director David Barnea plainly states: “Mossad is a fist. And if you fight Israel, you will never imagine how the fist finds its way to your face.”One surprising insight the film provides is how the original Palestinian cause serves as a point of origin and a continued unifying link between the terrorist proxies attacking Israel. An anonymous Lebanese Christian source, kept in darkness for his own safety, gives details. Hezbollah began, he reminds us, as a splinter faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization that began when Yasser Arafat relocated to Lebanon from Jordan in the 1970s. As the civil war in Lebanon dragged on from 1975 to 1990, Hezbollah coalesced out of a rag tag assembly of Shia militant groups. These were then equipped and trained into a formidable fighting force by Iranian Quds officers sent from the recently successful Iranian revolution. ‘Paging Hezbollah.’ Aveiled ProductionsThis paved the way for the emergence of the charismatic former leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, whose military efforts led to the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Southern Lebanon’s security zone. This weakening of Israel’s Northern border combined the militarization of the Lebanese South led to an inconclusive 54-day war in 2006 that resulted in the kidnapping and death of three Israeli soldiers. It was enough to embolden Iran and led to Iran commander Qasem Soleimani’s idea of the “ring of fire” or “noose of death”: The placing of a coalition of different terrorist proxies around the whole of Israel. Hezbollah, of course, was the key organization in this strategy. Iranian munitions, smart rockets, missiles and mortars flooded Hezbollah strategic points in the Lebanese South, most of them hidden under in around civilian infrastructure. Hezbollah also continuously planned for an invasive attack from the North as elaborate and destructive as the one eventually conducted by Hamas on October 7. Even so, Israel struggled with how to thwart Hezbollah’s embedded tactics in Lebanon, wishing to avoid heavy handed direct military engagement. Its luck turned when Hassan Nasrallah insisted that all Hezbollah operatives do away with their cell phones due to their vulnerability to spyware. At his command, he insisted that all Hezbollah personnel begin using pagers only, providing Mossad with an amazing opportunity. The film emphasizes the amount of meticulous old school espionage that was used to get the pagers into Hezbollah hands. A top Taiwanese sales agent —Hezbollah’s main technology supplier — had to be wooed by a completely invented Mossad shell company and convinced to supply the pagers to her clients without any knowledge of Mossad’s involvement. This included exhaustive product development and testing in the field. This was old fashioned spycraft: building false businesses and fronts, sending disguised agents to slowly build trust and new alliances, all to position the new military devices in the hands of their very paranoid and suspicious customers. Mossad is of course renowned for its feats of intelligence derring-do. They have regularly conducted, and continue to conduct, surgical strikes against terrorists through a combination of on the ground intelligence, steely patience, and cutting-edge military technology. Beyond its story of exceptional spycraft, however, the documentary offers reason for hope. Israel’s hope is not the wholesale destruction of its enemies, but rather, the establishment of a permanent and durable cease fire and an end to terror. With the crumbling of Hezbollah, peace talks have emerged between Israel and Lebanon for the first time in 43 years. As former Israeli Intelligence officer Sarit Zehavi says in the films final moments, “The day that Hezbollah will lay down their arms and Lebanon extends its hand in peace, there will be peace.”

‘Paging Hezbollah’ Thrillingly Recounts a Mossad Masterstroke

‘Paging Hezbollah’ Thrillingly Recounts a Mossad Masterstroke

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