'Paging Hezbollah' Presents a New Look at a Fantastic Counter-terror Op

Some time back, terrorist goblins like Hezbollah stopped using cellular phones, presuming correctly that those could be tracked. If it was an Israeli aircraft with smart weapons attached doing the tracking, that could ruin a terrorists’ whole day. So, Hezbollah and groups like them went old-school, adopting pagers instead. But that didn't work out so well for them either; turns out that Israel was already several steps ahead of them. 

Now, a new film, Paging Hezbollah, is giving us a great inside look at what was one of the most involved, as well as the most brilliantly planned and executed counter-terrorist operations in modern history. Here's the trailer.

As we documented at the time here at RedState, this was a plan years in the planning and execution. Hezbollah was worried about their cellular phones being tracked, but pagers, they reckoned, were passive devices. They could only receive data, not send it. But Israel and, specifically, the Mossad, had a counter. They worked their way into the entire supply chain for these devices, setting up the operation with a fake distribution company, carefully testing the devices to make sure they would maim or kill the goblin carrying a loaded pager without injuring a bystander. And boy, howdy, did it ever work. Once these things started going bang, every terrorist goblin in Lebanon and elsewhere started looking at their personal electronics and seeing grenades. That was, of course, part of the Mossad's objectives; this wasn't just an operation to take out terrorists. It was an operation designed to get in their heads. It was a psychological operation, and it worked. 

Consider what effect this may have had on the individual Hezbollah flunky's thinking. Bear in mind that many people are in the habit of carrying their personal electronics around on their belt, generally in front, so that it can be quickly grabbed. Now, consider what else a typical human male keeps in that general area, and you have terrorists contemplating the possibility of being removed from the gene pool without being killed, if you take my meaning. And, ironically, in this the Mossad borrowed a page from the Germans in World War II, who employed a land mine the Allies called a Bouncing Betty, which, when activated, shot a charge up to waist-height, where it detonated. Allied troops were understandably reluctant to cross ground where these were thought to have been emplaced; now, Hezbollah faced a similar dilemma.

As I wrote at the time:

While the entire "Pager go BOOM" operation was successful in taking some Hezbollah members off the board, the message was not just that. The message sent to Hezbollah and, in concatenation, to Hamas, ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other terrorist groups was this:

"Wherever you are, wherever you hide, we can find you, and if we can find you, we can hit you. You aren't safe in your homes, you aren't safe on the streets, and you aren't safe in your caves. Your communications are compromised. Your technology can be co-opted. And sooner or later, we will hit you."

Now, we are getting a look inside the operation. Paging Hezbollah reportedly dives into how this was planned and pulled off. It goes into details of the engineering of the devices, how they were infiltrated into Hezbollah's supply chain, how Israel brilliantly side-stepped Hezbollah's downgrading their communications to evade precisely this kind of thing. The trailer hints at interviews with people like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the former Director of the Mossad David Barnea, a former member of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) Intelligence Corps Sarit Zehavi, and many more. This film is said to give an inside look at this operation which was 15 years in the planning and execution. It's a must-see. Our sister site Townhall's Amy Curtis attended a prescreening of the film; Amy writes:

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."

That's certainly no exaggeration. As I have been saying and writing for years, this is the great conflict of our time, this clash between civilization and barbarity.

You can view the official website of Paging Hezbollah here. The film will be in theaters on October 30.

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