Paging Hezbollah: Documenting Tactical Brilliance

The 1983 Hezbollah bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut was the largest loss of American servicemen lives in one day, since Iwo Jima. Tht means it was worse than any single day during the Korean or Vietnam Wars. Consequently, nobody can say Americans do not have a stake in Israel’s war against Hezbollah. Fortunately for the civilized world, Israel has waged that war with inspired creativity and deception. Honestly, those exploding pagers ought to rank up near the original Trojan Horse in the history of covert operations. Several veterans of the Israeli military and intelligence services explain how they pulled it off in Justin Folk’s documentary, Paging Hezbollah, which is currently screening nightly in Brooklyn.

It didn’t start with October 7^th. For years, Hezbollah systematically devastated Lebanon, using it as a base of operations against Israel. Folk and his on-camera experts rewind to provide viewers all the historical context the media usually ignores. The PLO initially destabilized Lebanon, moving into the once prosperous nation, after Jordan evicted them. The PLO subsequently precipitated a civil war, plunging Lebanon into chaos, making it a natural home for terrorist factions, lie Hezbollah.

Israel had occupied a security zone in Lebanon, to protect Galilee from bombardment, but they unilaterally withdrew. That worked out about as well for Israeli security as granting Gaza independent autonomy. Not surprisingly, Hezbollah promptly occupied Israel’s former battlements, turning them into rocket launching sites. Consequently, Israel’s greatest fear during 10/7 was a simultaneous invasion from the north. Fortunately, Hezbollah was not prepared at the time, but they immediately stepped-up rocket attacks after 10/7—launching over 12,400 projectiles in a mere one-year span. Hence, Israel had to deal with Hezbollah, sooner, rather than later.

The pager plan was brilliant from technical, logistical, and even marketing standpoints. The Mossad actually created shell companies to sell electronics into the Middle East, for whom they produced online commercials for their “tough” pagers. According to the campaign, they were dust-proof and water-proof making them for the modern active terrorist. (Fearing Israel’s electronic surveillance, Hezbollah terror boss Hassan Nasrallah prohibited cellphone use, in favor of devices like pagers, which do not emit signals.)

As fate would have it, the pagers were plan B. The Mossad first tried to deploy exploding walkies, but they largely sat unused until a major terror attack. However, those walkies were already in place after the successful pager counter-attack, to serve as Hezbollah’s fallback.

The true brilliance of the pager plan is its extremely targeted nature. The explosives were calibrated to wound rather than kill. The idea was to minimize collateral damage and prevent martyrdom. However, they successfully exposed the upper ranks of Hezbollah, removing them from the field and crippling their lines of communication.