A new documentary featuring Netanyahu, former Mossad chief David Barnea and David Petraeus tells how Israel planted explosive pagers in Hezbollah's network. In theaters October 30.
A new documentary will take audiences inside the Israeli operation that turned Hezbollah's own pagers into weapons. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Mossad director David Barnea and former CIA director David Petraeus are among those who give firsthand accounts in the film.
Paging Hezbollah, directed by Justin Folk, opens in U.S. theaters on October 30. The first teaser came out on Thursday. Folk previously made the Daily Wire documentaries What Is a Woman? and Am I Racist?
In the trailer, Netanyahu describes the pagers as a "handful of TNT" that "changed the world." Netanyahu has said little publicly about the operation beyond confirming that Israel carried it out. Petraeus calls the operation a "modern-day Trojan horse."
The filmmakers say the documentary covers the full arc of the operation. It shows how Israel engineered the devices, infiltrated the supply chain and persuaded Hezbollah to adopt technology the terror group believed was secure.
"We wanted to tell the actual inside story," Folk told the Daily Wire, describing years of patience, engineering, deception and tradecraft. "We aimed to make the film of record for the operation, so we went right to the source."
Other interviewees include former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren, former National Security Council head Yaakov Nagel, Hezbollah expert Matthew Levitt, and Sarit Zehavi, a former IDF intelligence officer. According to Townhall, the film also features October 7 survivors and the sister of a victim of Hezbollah's July 2024 rocket strike on Majdal Shams, where 12 children were killed on a soccer field.
The operation became public on September 17, 2024. That afternoon, thousands of pagers carried by Hezbollah operatives exploded almost simultaneously across Lebanon and parts of Syria. The next day, Hezbollah's handheld radios exploded as well.
Lebanese officials put the toll from the two waves at 42 dead and about 4,000 wounded, most of them Hezbollah members. The attacks cut Hezbollah's communications and left many of its operatives unable to return to the fight.
Ten days after the pagers exploded, an Israeli airstrike on Hezbollah's underground headquarters in Beirut killed the group's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, along with other senior commanders.
The film runs about an hour and a half. It combines archival and news footage, dramatic reenactments and interviews with people involved in planning the operation.
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