The terrorist organization had switched to pagers and other low-tech devices for communication after leader Hassan Nasrallah warned members that cell phones could be tracked. The pagers that exploded were part of a new batch ordered from Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, and officials said a small amount of explosives was inserted into the devices before they reached Lebanon.

Dozens of Hezbollah members were killed, and thousands more were wounded, with many injuries to the hands, faces, and eyes. One of the injured was Iran's ambassador to Hezbollah.

But this was not an operation conceived and executed overnight. Instead, it was a multi-year infiltration of Hezbollah supply chains that was meant to strike at the heart of a terrorist organization that had targeted Israel for years.

Israel knew that Hezbollah lived, worked, and operated among ordinary citizens and that a conventional military attack could harm countless innocents, so the plan had a simple mandate: hit the terrorists, not civilians. Even with that directive, the task was still daunting. There were thousands of terrorists and a plan that could have been exposed at any moment. Despite the enormity of the mission, Israel knew it could exploit Hezbollah's weakness — its trust of pagers and walkie-talkies — and turn that into a modern-day Trojan Horse.

Now, in a brand new just announced film, director Justin Folk has turned the remarkable, daring story of how Israel struck at the heart of Hezbollah into a thrilling, intriguing documentary: "Paging Hezbollah."

"Paging Hezbollah" reveals the gripping story of how the operation infiltrated Hezbollah's networks, including the engineering of devices and the supply chain, to the work that deceived Hezbollah into adopting older technologies it thought were secure. It features firsthand interviews and accounts from high-ranking individuals connected to the operation, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, General David Petraeus, former Director of Mossad David Barnea, former member of the Israel Defense Forces Intelligence Corps Sarit Zehavi, and others.

It was an operation 15 years in the making, and one made all the more urgent by the October 7, 2023 terror attacks.

I was privileged to get an exclusive sneak peek of the film, and I found it absolutely riveting. Folk took a complex geopolitical story with a long history and turned it into a tight, 93-minute mix of archival and news footage, dramatic reenactments, and interviews with those aforementioned officials as well as survivors of the October 7 terror attacks and the sister of a victim of the deadly July 27, 2024 Hezbollah missile attack on Majdal Shams, the Druze town in Golan Heights. Near the end of the film, Prime Minister Netanyahu reminds us all what's at stake in this conflict: "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."

"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."

You can read more about "Paging Hezbollah" here, and the film will open in U.S. theaters nationwide on October 30.

https://townhall.com/news/amy-curtis/2026/09/24/paging-hezbollah-historic-2024-operation-against-the-terrorist-group-n2683496