Two years ago, Israel’s Mossad executed the legendary pager operation. In a single blow, the strike would eliminate dozens of terrorists and wound 3,500 more, taking some of Hezbollah’s best fighting force off the battlefield. The next day, hundreds of Hezbollah-owned walkie-talkies would blow up, injuring or killing several more.
It was the opening salvo of a military campaign that went on to eliminate Hezbollah’s top leadership and dismantle its Iran-sponsored multi-billion-dollar terrorist infrastructure.
In their new book, In the War Room, Elliot Kaufman and Yonah Jeremy Bob recount the moment the operation began: “At 3:30 p.m. on September 17, 2024, pagers began to beep and buzz in Beirut and all over Lebanon, alerting Hezbollah operatives to a message from their commanders. But the message was not from Hassan Nasrallah or anyone else in the terrorist organization. Within less than ten seconds, the pagers would explode, sending Hezbollah, Lebanon, Iran, and even the [Biden] White House into a panic.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government reportedly did not give Washington advance notice of the strike. “The Biden administration was about as shocked as Hezbollah” and White House staffers “reacted with genuine alarm at the escalatory potential of Israel’s action,” the book reveals.
Video showing Hezbollah pagers blowing up, hurting individual fighters but no one else. Notice the amount of US dollars that were on this Hezbollah dude. pic.twitter.com/AcoDRDL7yG
— Hussain Abdul-Hussain (@hahussain) September 17, 2024
This was a war of Hezbollah’s own choosing. The Lebanon-based Iranian proxy terror group entered the conflict on October 8, 2023, just 24 hours after the Hamas-led massacre. The year-long missile and drone strikes forced 70,000 civilians to flee northern Israel.
What Hezbollah and its Iranian paymasters started, Israel would finish. The flawlessly executed Mossad strike broke Hezbollah’s will to wage its war of terror. Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah cried and fell into ‘serious’ depression after the pager blasts, his family members told the media.
“Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah was consumed by rage over Israel’s detonation of pagers worn by members of his group throughout Lebanon, according to his son,” Reuters reported in September 20205. “He was upset, angry, resentful – there was a lot of resentment and thinking, ‘How could this happen?’” Nasrallah’s son Jawad told the news agency.
Nasrallah’s agony, however, would be short-lived. Just ten days after the Mossad operation, the terror chief himself was eliminated in a precision Israeli airstrike on his bunker complex in Beirut.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a minute-long video marking the second anniversary of the strike.
לפני שנתיים פוצצנו את הביפרים של חיזבאללה 📟 pic.twitter.com/lHmpvhDySA
— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) September 18, 2026
As Reuters later revealed, Mossad had “planted a small amount of explosives inside 5,000 Taiwan-made pagers ordered by Lebanese group Hezbollah months before” the strike.
It took years of planning to infiltrate Hezbollah’s supply chain. A Mossad-run Hungarian shell company convinced the terrorist group to buy their Taiwan-made pagers. Ironically branded “Golden Apollo,” after the patron-god of the city of Troy, Hezbollah literally paid to import these “Trojan Horses.” If that wasn’t ironic enough, replacing cell phones with pagers was Nasrallah’s own idea to “fly under the radar” with a low-tech solution.
In “In the War Room,” Bob and Kaufman reveal that Mossad initially abandoned the pager project because of its obvious, insurmountable technical and operational obstacles. “Already by 2018, the Mossad was thinking about the pager option. But the Mossad’s technologists hit various snags,” they write. “Certain Mossad agents, however, were fixated on tampering with the beepers, no matter the obstacles.”
According to the book, unnamed Mossad heroes believed in the project and kept it alive. “Within the spy agency, agents sometimes work clandestinely, on their own time, to keep ideas alive that have been officially shut down. The patriotic hope is to revive the idea for when the time is right.”
Happy Anniversary to all who celebrate the most precise and lethal attack on terrorists, ever. The exploding Hezbollah pagers, courtesy of Israel’s Mossad.
In all of human history, there has never been an intelligence operation like this. FAFO. pic.twitter.com/MVyUHR7Vfg
— Sia Kordestani (@SiaKordestani) September 17, 2026
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