New Documentary 'Paging Hezbollah' Previews Israel's 2024 Pager Attack Through Netanyahu, Mossad Interviews

A documentary called "Paging Hezbollah" released its first teaser Thursday, promising an inside look at one of the strangest and most consequential intelligence operations of the last decade. Director Justin Folk, who previously made the Daily Wire films "Am I Racist?" and "What Is a Woman?", says he secured firsthand interviews from the people who planned it.

That list includes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Mossad Director David Barnea, former CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus, former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren, former Israeli National Security Council chief Yaakov Nagel, Hezbollah expert Matthew Levitt, and former Israeli intelligence official Sarit Zehavi, according to Breitbart and the Daily Wire.

The operation itself is not new. It became public on September 17, 2024, when thousands of pagers carried by Hezbollah members began exploding almost simultaneously across Lebanon and parts of Syria. A second wave hit the next day, when hundreds of handheld radios used by the group detonated.

According to the Daily Wire, a Lebanese minister who is also a Hezbollah member said the attack killed 42 people and injured roughly 4,000, with victims losing fingers, hands, and eyes, and suffering shrapnel wounds. Those figures have not been independently verified by the sources reviewed here beyond that minister's own account.

Years in the Making, Not a Single Strike

Both outlets describe the operation as the product of years of planning rather than a single decision. Hezbollah's longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah had pushed members toward pagers and other low-tech devices, warning that cellphones exposed them to Israeli surveillance and targeting.

That precaution became the opening Israel needed. The filmmakers say the documentary traces how Israel engineered the compromised devices, infiltrated the supply chain that delivered them to Hezbollah, and convinced the terror group the technology was secure, all before detonating them on command.

"A handful of TNT changed the world," Netanyahu says in the trailer, holding up a pager. Petraeus, in his own interview for the film, calls it a "modern-day Trojan horse."

Folk told the Daily Wire the film is meant to answer the question that followed the attack once Israel claimed responsibility: "How did they pull that off?" He described the access as rare for a film covering a historical spy operation, saying the team went "right to the source."

The UN Speech Connection

The teaser's release lined up with Netanyahu's address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Thursday, where he referenced the pager operation directly. "Remember the pagers?" Netanyahu said from the podium, holding one up. "Hezbollah sure does."

Neither source provided a confirmed release date for the full documentary. What's public so far is the teaser and the list of participants, not the finished film.

An Unanswered Question the Film May or May Not Settle

The documentary is, by its own framing, told from Israel's perspective, through interviews with the officials who planned and executed the operation. When thousands of pagers exploded in pockets, bags, and on belts across Lebanon and Syria simultaneously, the devices detonated on whoever was carrying them at that moment, not necessarily confirmed combatants in an active military role.

Neither Breitbart nor the Daily Wire's reporting on the film establishes how many of the reported 42 dead or 4,000 injured were verified Hezbollah operatives versus family members, bystanders, or others who happened to be holding the devices when they went off. That distinction matters for any accounting of the operation's proportionality, and it's an open question the sources here don't answer. Whether the documentary itself addresses that gap, or simply tells the story of the operation's engineering and execution, is something viewers won't know until the film is actually released.

Hezbollah is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, the pager and radio attacks did significant damage to its communications network and personnel in September 2024, and the operation has become one of the most studied examples of supply-chain infiltration in modern intelligence history. The documentary adds firsthand testimony from the people who built it. Based on what's public so far, it does not add an independent casualty count or civilian breakdown beyond the figure attributed to the Lebanese minister.