Israel’s legendary pager operation against Hezbollah — the intelligence strike that simultaneously hit thousands of terrorists across Lebanon and Syria — is getting the tell-all documentary treatment, featuring rare firsthand accounts from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the former head of Mossad.
Netanyahu is among several high-profile Israeli and U.S. intelligence figures featured in “Paging Hezbollah,” a new documentary from director Justin Folk that dropped its first teaser Thursday.
The film promises to answer the question everyone asked after Israel took credit for the September 2024 operation: How did they pull that off?
“I’m thrilled that our team gets to answer that question. The Israeli pager operation was as imaginative as it was improbable. This is the inside story told by the people directly involved, and the story is more fascinating than one could imagine.”
Folk, the director behind hit Daily Wire documentaries “Am I Racist?” and “What Is a Woman?”, told The Daily Wire it’s rare to film a historical spy operation with this level of access.
The trailer showcases Netanyahu, who has said little publicly about the operation beyond confirming Israel was behind it. In the teaser, he describes the weaponized pagers as a “handful of TNT [that] changed the world.”
The September 2024 strike centered on pagers used by Hezbollah operatives. The devices detonated simultaneously across Lebanon and Syria, followed the next day by explosions involving Hezbollah’s handheld radios.
The operation left 42 dead and another 4,000 injured, according to a Lebanese minister who is also part of Hezbollah. Victims lost fingers, hands, and eyes from the blasts.
The operation has since become one of the most closely watched examples of intelligence and supply-chain infiltration in modern warfare.
Little is known about the behind-the-scenes work that went into building the pagers, how they were placed with Hezbollah, and how Israel decided to activate them. The filmmakers say the documentary will lay out how Israel penetrated Hezbollah’s communications network by engineering the devices, infiltrating the supply chain, and convincing the terror group to adopt technology it believed was secure.
The film calls the pager operation a culmination of years of planning and deception rather than a single strike conceived overnight. The documentary will examine how the devices were “engineered, marketed, and smuggled in before anyone knew what it was,” tracing the operation from its origins through its eventual activation.
Beyond Netanyahu, the film features rare interviews with David Barnea, then-head of Mossad, and former CIA Director David Petraeus, who calls the operation a “modern-day Trojan horse.”
Other interviews include former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren, former U.S. intelligence official Matthew Levitt, former head of Israel’s National Security Council General Jacob Nagel, and former Israeli intelligence official Sarit Zehavi.
The trailer presents the operation as a potential turning point in the conflict, with interviewees discussing the strategic significance of striking Hezbollah’s communications network.
“Many people heard about the pager operation and wondered how it was even possible. We wanted to tell the actual inside story — years of patience, engineering, deception, and tradecraft that seem more like fiction than fact.”
Folk said the team aimed to make the film of record for the operation by going directly to the source. “The deeper we went, the more incredible the real story became.”
The film hits theaters October 30.
