The Lebanese resistance movement formally presented the project under the name “Promise and Commitment,” known in Arabic as Wa’ad wa Iltizam.
Officials described it as comprehensive, direct and urgent aid for households whose homes were destroyed or badly damaged during the Israeli aggression.
RELATED: Lebanon Reports 7,700 Israeli Violations of Framework Agreement
The program sets a ceiling of $14,000 for affected families in Beirut and its southern suburb of Dahiye. Of that sum, $8,000 will go toward replacing furniture and household goods, while $6,000 will cover rental costs. In the rest of Lebanon’s affected regions, the maximum assistance reaches $12,000, with rent capped at $4,000.
The payments will be made in four installments over one year, starting with an initial payment of $3,500 for the capital and its suburbs and $3,000 for the rest of the country.
The program covers owners of homes destroyed either fully or partially, as well as displaced people from border zones and areas that remain inaccessible.
The head of Hezbollah’s Executive Council, Sheikh Ali Daamoush, announced the resistance’s new “Promise and Commitment” housing assistance program for forcibly displaced families whose homes were damaged by Israeli aggression across Lebanon.
— VPol (@VocalPolitics1) October 13, 2026
￭ Eligible residential units in… pic.twitter.com/GV2hoCzp0V
A joint report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Lebanese National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS-L), published in June, assessed the damage from Israeli attacks up to that date. It found that 11,095 buildings were completely destroyed, affecting 17,891 housing units.
Another 2,242 buildings suffered partial damage, affecting 5,219 units, and 9,311 buildings sustained minor damage, affecting 18,282 units. Damage was estimated at $1.38 billion.
Lebanese authorities have also reported the return of 400,000 displaced people to the south of the country following the Israeli aggression. That return adds urgency to the housing effort, as many families come back to neighborhoods where their homes no longer stand.
The aid program is structured around that reality. By splitting payments across a full year, the initiative aims to cover both immediate needs and the longer process of rebuilding lives and households.
For the poorest households, the initial installments provide a bridge while more durable reconstruction gets underway. The program’s architects say the subsidies address both the loss of possessions and the cost of temporary shelter.
The presentation of the housing project carries political weight beyond its material value. Hezbollah has positioned reconstruction as central to its post-war standing, presenting the rebuilding effort as a form of resilience against what it describes as foreign aggression.
كشف حزب الله عن تفاصيل برنامج الإيواء الجديد، محدّدًا التعويضات بين 12 و14 ألف دولار للوحدة السكنية، بحسب المنطقة، مع دفعة أولى تتراوح بين 3000 و3500 دولار
— Beirut Politics (@beirut_politics) October 13, 2026
فكيف ستُصرف المبالغ المتبقية، وما شروط الاستفادة من البرنامج؟
Hezbollah has revealed the details of its new housing… pic.twitter.com/JSH9RQQNEq
Text reads: “Hezbollah has revealed the details of its new housing assistance program, setting compensation at between $12,000 and $14,000 per residential unit, depending on the area, with an initial payment ranging from $3,000 to $3,500.”
Presenting the initiative, Hezbollah Executive Council head Sheikh Ali Damoush said its implementation would show the victory of reconstruction over destruction and of resistance over what he called foreign barbarity. Damoush sharply criticized the Lebanese government, affirming that authorities have not presented any effective plan to help the hundreds of thousands of displaced people and have not taken responsibility for assessing damage and rebuilding.
The program’s rollout now begins with registration and verification of affected families, followed by the first disbursements.
“I’m okay.” That was the last message I sent my mother before an Israeli strike hit us, a group of seven journalists reporting in southern Lebanon.
Three years ago, on 13 October 2023, my colleague Dylan Collins and I headed to the southern border of Lebanon to cover the situation following cross-border shelling between Israeli forces and Hezbollah. We spent the morning filming UN peacekeeping force patrols along the blue line dividing Lebanon and Israel. The atmosphere was calm and nothing suggested that the day was about to change and upend our lives. We went to a coffee shop near a UN post where journalists from different outlets had gathered and there we met our friend and Reuters colleague Issam Abdallah.
Around 4:50PM, we heard a bombardment in a nearby town so we moved to an exposed hill in Alma Al-Shaab, where Al-Jazeera journalists Carmen Joukhadar and Elie Brakhya were positioned. Together with colleagues from Reuters, we were a group of seven journalists, all wearing press vests, reporting next to a car marked “TV”. We were clearly identifiable as press and spent about an hour filming while an Israeli drone hovered above us. At 5:57 I finished filing my photos and sent a message to my mother to tell her I was okay. Seconds later, I found myself on the ground, bleeding and screaming for help. Dylan rushed over with a tourniquet, but before he even had the time to put it, another strike hit.
Everyone disappeared and I was left alone, unable to move and the heat of the flames creeping closer to my face. I was terrified of burning alive, so I started crawling away with the camera still hanging from my neck and its strap tightening around my neck with every move. Two weeks later, I woke up from an induced coma with one leg missing, the other severely damaged, and Issam dead.
What followed was as horrific and brutal as the attack itself and it didn’t stop there. What happened to us was not an isolated incident — for three years I watched journalists being killed in Lebanon and Gaza by Israeli forces in ways that felt painfully familiar.
In October 2024, Israeli forces struck a compound in Hasbaya where journalists were staying and killed media workers Ghassan Najjar, Mohammed Reda and Wissam Kassem, while they slept.
Human Rights Watch found no evidence of military activity at the site and concluded that the strike was deliberate and should be investigated as war crime.
Then in April 2026, journalist Amal Khalil was killed in southern Lebanon after an Israeli strike hit the building where she had taken shelter with her colleague Zainab Faraj, leaving both women trapped under the rubble. Investigations found that Israeli forces repeatedly obstructed rescue efforts.
Since our attack, dozens of journalists have been killed in Lebanon, and nearly 200 journalists have been killed in Gaza by Israeli forces.
Many have been mired by Israel with the same false allegations that they were “terrorists.” The dead can’t defend themselves against such accusations, but I survived and I can speak about what happened to us.
In June 2026 in an interview on France 2, Israel’s ambassador to France described the 13 October attack as a “mistake” saying that we were not targeted because we were journalists, but because Israeli forces had mistaken us for “terrorists.” The evidence tells a different story.
Five independent investigations by Agence France-Presse, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, Reuters, and UNIFIL found no indication of fighters or military activity at the site, and no cross-border exchange of fire for more than 40 minutes before we were struck with a 120mm tank shell.
These investigations matter because they establish with certainty evidence beyond my own personal account.
What remains unanswered is who gave the order, who fired the double-tap strike, and why no one has been held accountable. These are basic questions that can be answered by Israel if they were sought by EU member states.
Three years on, Issam’s family and the survivors of this attack deserve to know: Who gave the order?
Evidence alone cannot deliver justice, someone must be willing to act on it. In the face of this attack, including the targeting of four of its own citizens on Lebanese soil, the Lebanese government has failed us.
Neither Lebanon nor Israel are party to the Rome Statute, meaning that the International Criminal Court does not have jurisdiction to prosecute those responsible for the attack.
In 2024, Lebanon approved a special declaration that would have allowed the Court to investigate war crimes committed after 7 October 2023, only to later reverse its decision for political reasons.
And now, making our legal path even more complicated, in June 2026 Lebanon signed a new framework agreement with Israel whereby Clause 13 commits both sides to cease “all hostile and adverse actions in international and legal fora.”
I have no hope left that we will ever get justice for what we lost, but I will not rest before I know the names and faces of those responsible.
Our case is the most documented instance of Israeli forces targeting the press on record. The October 13 targeted attack was perpetrated by Israeli forces on a group of journalists clearly identifiable as press.
If we cannot get answers in the face of such overwhelming evidence, what does it mean for the hundreds of journalists killed by Israeli fire throughout the region for which there is no such evidence?
This is where the European Union must act. The EU has repeatedly said that journalists must not be attacked and that violations of international law must be met with accountability. Today, we demand actions not just words and statements. The EU must demand that Israel provide a full account of the 13 October attack, including who ordered, authorized and carried out the strikes.
For me, this is not an abstract question of foreign policy. Issam was my friend. I survived that attack with one leg missing. I know what it means when the people responsible for an attack are allowed to remain unnamed and unaccountable.
I am asking the EU not simply to stand with journalists in words, but to stand with us in action.
The EU has political, diplomatic, and legal leverage. It should use it. If Israel refuses to fully explain what occurred and disclose those responsible for killing and maiming journalists who were visibly identifiable as press, EU member states should use every available mechanism to pursue accountability, including further targeted sanctions or suspending trade with Israel.
I refuse to believe that a military with advanced surveillance could have simply mistaken us for fighters and attacked us in a double-tap strike, a tactic repeatedly used by Israel in this war. But, if that’s truly what happened, then Israel must still answer for how such incompetence and failure was possible.
For now, justice evades us, but the truth of who gave the order is within reach and we must demand it.
Sputnik – 12.10.2026
MOSCOW – Russia believes that the use of force by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Lebanon grossly violate international law, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday.
At a press conference with Lebanese Foreign Minister Youssef Raji, Lavrov said that they discussed Israel’s ongoing actions in Lebanon, adding that Moscow has reaffirmed its position in support of Lebanon’s sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity.
“Of course, we are committed to our assessments that the military actions of the IDF, the Israeli army, grossly violate the norms of international law and provoke an additional escalation of tensions in Lebanon,” Lavrov said.
This was part of a broader discussion of the situation in the Middle East, the Russian minister said.
“We certainly discussed the situation in the region and examined issues related to developments in the Gulf, in and around Syria, and, naturally, in Palestine, where Israel’s actions are a source of particular concern, as they create facts on the ground that directly contradict the UN resolution on the establishment of a Palestinian state,” Lavrov said.
Two years after Israel’s pager attacks on Lebanon killed dozens and maimed thousands, Lebanese investigative journalist Radwan Mortada’s new two-part Al Jazeera documentary, The Trap (Al-Mesyada), goes inside the September 2024 Mossad operation more than a decade in the making.
Mortada joins Rania Khalek to trace the web of front companies stretching from Taiwan to Bulgaria that enabled Israel to infiltrate Gold Apollo, a supplier Hezbollah had trusted for decades.
As a new Israeli propaganda film Paging Hezbollah heads for US theaters, Mortada reveals that Israel’s goal to kill as many as 20,000 Hezbollah fighters with booby-trapped walkie-talkies, in fact, fell far short. He also breaks down Hezbollah’s own fatal mistakes, and the lasting psychological toll of a terrorist attack that, contrary to US and Israeli narratives, was far from “precise” or “targeted,” destroying the lives of children, families, and medical workers.
“Hezbollah’s biggest mistake was forgetting Israel’s capabilities – forgetting how bloody and cruel they can be.”
Watch The Trap Part 1: aljazeera360.com/video/1017661
Part 2: aljazeera360.com/video/1017626
Watch full episodes of BT Live, join breakthroughnews.org as a member today!
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Rough transcript follows:
[Rana:] And joining me to discuss this two-part investigative deep dive into the pager attacks is the producer himself, Redwan Mortada. Redwan, welcome to Breakthrough News Live.
[Redwan Mortada:] Thank you, Rana. Thank you for having me.
[Rana:] Well, it’s a real pleasure, and I got a chance to watch the documentary. I encourage everybody to go check it out. It’s available online. It’s also available with English subtitles, and it’s really worth the watch. I mean, you expose so much new information we didn’t know before. But before we get into some of the specifics, Redwan, I want to ask you, you’ve called this one of the most complex cases that you’ve ever worked on as an investigative journalist. And we have all watched Israel commit so many atrocities across Lebanon that have killed far more people than the pager attacks did. Yet, in your film, you call this the most devastating blow that Hezbollah has taken since its founding. So, two years on from this attack, why does this operation still loom so large that you felt it warranted a two-part investigative series?
[Redwan Mortada:] You’re right, Rania. Israel killed tens of thousands of Lebanese over the years. But in fact, this operation is different—the pager attack. I mean, because it came from a place Hezbollah thought was secure for years and years, for decades, if you want. There has been an intelligence war between the resistance, mainly between Hezbollah and Israel, in Lebanon and in the region. Israel assassinated several senior commanders of Hezbollah, carried out several operations against it, killing Abbas al-Musawi, the ex-secretary-general, and at the same time, Hezbollah carried out several operations against Israel. But this pager operation was different because it was one of the biggest blows to Hezbollah—an attack that only Mossad could imagine. No one could imagine this kind of operation and this kind of killing, because it didn’t only affect Hezbollah fighters. It affected tons of children and women, and it breaches all international and humanitarian rules across the world.
[Rana:] Yeah. And just for everybody who’s watching Breakthrough News and your organization, Blue House Films, you produced a documentary on the pager attacks and how they impacted civilians specifically that came out last year. People who are probably watching this have seen that documentary, and it shows the toll specifically on children and other civilians caught up in it—their faces totally maimed, destroyed, and blinded for those who did survive. I mean, just a horrific attack. But your documentary, this two-part series, really dives deep into the timeline of Israel plotting this attack. I mean, Israel spent years on this; it started back in 2015. And in your documentary, you lay out how Mossad built these front companies spanning Taiwan, Hong Kong, Hungary, and Bulgaria. They infiltrated the pager company that Hezbollah had grown to trust, they manipulated the Hezbollah representative that was dealing with that company, and they rigged the devices with small amounts of this powerful explosive substance hidden in the batteries that was so hard to detect, and then they detonated them at a moment of their choosing. I mean, the way you lay it out, it plays like a movie thriller. So walk us through some of that Israeli timeline—how did they pull this off?
[Redwan Mortada:] It is a long story. You have to watch the film and go deep into the details, the exclusive information, the exclusive data, and the interviews, because it also presents the story of Hezbollah. We post in the film the email communications between the company called Gold Apollo and Hezbollah. But in fact, if I want to go back to how this started, after the 2006 war, Israel started looking for ways to penetrate Hezbollah, especially its network and communication, because you know the result of the war in 2006 was that Hezbollah beat Israel, and Israel wanted revenge. So they started trying to penetrate Hezbollah. They tried to recruit the sales representatives in Taiwan; they failed. They tried to sell pagers to Hezbollah through several front companies, but they failed. And the story they distributed in the media about a blonde girl that manipulated a representative to sell him the pagers was not true. The truth is that they penetrated a trusted company that had a relation with this company over 20 years, starting in the 2000s—Gold Apollo. So they penetrated Hezbollah through this company. They recruited Teresa, the employee in the company, and through recruiting Teresa, they penetrated Hezbollah, and they sent these pagers. And it was not just one plan for Mossad; there was a Plan A and a Plan B. Plan A was to explode the walkie-talkies, and this operation started in 2014. I am not saying that Israeli officials declared that, but they succeeded in sending 15,000 walkie-talkies to Hezbollah. But these walkie-talkies were in storage, and Hezbollah did not decide to go into battle in full power, so they did not distribute all the walkie-talkies; they distributed around 800 walkie-talkies. So Mossad moved to the second plan, which is Plan B—detonating the pagers. This operation started in 2020, and they succeeded in sending 500 pagers to Hezbollah at the beginning, in 2023. Because of the necessity of the battle at the beginning, Hezbollah refused these pagers because this model—the new model—was different; he had ordered the old model. Gold Apollo sent Hezbollah the new model, and the representative of Hezbollah whose name was Mike said, “We don’t want to deal with you because we ordered the old version.” But because of the necessity of the battle and the urge of what was going on after October 7, it forced Hezbollah to receive 4,200 pagers, and they distributed around 3,000, of which only 1,850 exploded.
[Rana:] Yeah. And people really need to go watch this documentary, because you also lay out how the Israelis would find out that Hezbollah was on to them, and then they would stop scanners from Iran from coming to Lebanon that could have detected the substance by bombing a warehouse and another warehouse, and then claiming they were bombing this to kill somebody when it was really to stop Hezbollah from finding out about the pagers. I mean, it’s just really wild stuff. But I want to talk about Hezbollah’s mistakes here, because the attack did expose how deeply Hezbollah had been penetrated, which is what you’re talking about. And you mentioned 2006. After 2006, Hezbollah did build its own communications network, and you described in the documentary how this is precisely because Lebanon’s telecoms were so compromised by the Israelis. And then the war in Syria turned Hezbollah into a much larger and more exposed army that allowed for more penetration. At the same time, these failures come off as so shocking, because Hezbollah did have guardrails in place to try to detect if anything was messed with. What were some of Hezbollah’s mistakes? Again, people really should go watch the documentary because you go into deep detail on what those mistakes were. But if you had to give a brief explanation, what were Hezbollah’s mistakes, and could this have been prevented? And I guess I’d also add to that, has Hezbollah reckoned with this internally?
[Redwan Mortada:] I said it in the film, and I will repeat it: the biggest mistake was forgetting Israeli capabilities and forgetting how bloody and cruel they can be. This is one of the biggest mistakes Hezbollah committed. In fact, you’re right, the war in Syria exposed Hezbollah, and the capabilities and advanced technology Israel had also helped them to do this operation. But in addition to that, they used a new kind of technology, which is CL-20—a new kind of US explosive material manufactured by the United States of America. This kind of explosion is not detectable, and also when Hezbollah gave the pagers that did not explode to the Lebanese army, when they detected it… I put in the film that report that mentions this is an unknown material; it’s not listed in the explosive library. That’s why the airport scanners in Hong Kong, Turkey, and Lebanon couldn’t detect it.
[Rana:] That’s so scary. It’s so scary to think what else they’ve infiltrated.
[Redwan Mortada:] Especially, Rana, these pager devices are civilian devices; they are not military devices.
[Rana:] Yeah. Well, you also—I thought it was super interesting—mentioned in the documentary that Hezbollah’s Imad Mughniyeh used to cut open screws when he would take apart devices to make sure the screw hadn’t been messed with. I mean, one of the biggest mistakes that was mentioned was that Hezbollah operatives were asking questions—there was something weird about these pagers and walkie-talkies, and they were taking them apart and looking at the different pieces to see what was wrong with them, but they never cut open the batteries because…
[Redwan Mortada:] Okay, that shows a lot, by the way. That shows a lot, because even us at the time, when this happened, our question was: where was Hezbollah? Where was the protocol for experimenting on all of these? In fact, I mentioned in the film that there was like a mind race between Hezbollah and the Mossad officer, and it was one step… I mentioned two names in the film, and Jibril Jibril is a nickname for Hussein Bazi, an engineer inside Hezbollah. He was an officer who had doubts, and when he started to remove these pagers from small groups, Israel knew about that and decided to start the operation instead of losing the element of surprise.
[Rana:] So that they could do at least some damage, even though they didn’t get to kill as many people as they wanted. I wanted to ask you, though, obviously this did not destroy Hezbollah because they were able to go on and fight the war in 2024, but it did do a lot of damage to the organization. So can you explain, in terms of manpower, command, morale, and trust in their own systems, what was the damage of this operation to Hezbollah?
[Redwan Mortada:] For me, I think the biggest impact was psychological. The Israelis started this war by exploding the pagers. The first day they exploded the pagers; the second day they exploded the walkie-talkies. Then they carried out over 1,400 airstrikes on Lebanon in one day. After that, they assassinated the special forces commanders—the Radwan Force in Hezbollah—until they assassinated Hassan Nasrallah. For around 10 days, Hezbollah and Lebanese society experienced and went through one of the hardest days in our history. The goal and target for Israel was to destroy Hezbollah. But in fact, Hezbollah survived, and you can tell that if you do a comparison between the war in 2024 and the war in 2026, the level of assassination and the level of penetration wasn’t the same at all.
[Rana:] I want to ask you also, Redwan, you talked about this in your documentary, and I covered it in the documentary that I did with Blue House: Israel and its supporters continue to celebrate this as a marvel of precision. They call it surgical, targeted, and clean. And actually, I don’t know if you’ve seen, but the Israelis also have a movie coming out called Paging Hezbollah.
[Redwan Mortada:] A propaganda film, you mean? The propaganda film where they started swimming and they are at the beach, and you will hear another voice: “We are in a special area, but in fact, we are in a hostile environment where everyone wants to destroy us”? They are justifying why they went into a major operation.
[Rana:] Yeah. So this is going to be in American theaters on October 30th. It’s called Paging Hezbollah, an Israeli propaganda film that celebrates this attack. I encourage people, instead of watching that, to go watch Redwan’s documentary, which we’ll include a link to in the description. But I wanted to ask you, what was the actual impact of what Israel did on civilians? Israel and the US celebrate the pager operation as a major achievement, calling it precise and targeted. But they are lying. They are liars, because really it was a terrorist attack, a war crime, because it also hit civilians. And you met tons of civilians, women and children, in your documentary. But in fact, this is not just my word; Human Rights Watch said it was a war crime. Booby-trapped pagers used by civilians on a daily basis—when they exploded, they didn’t target only Hezbollah fighters, because you know they are a part of Lebanese society, and they chose a peak time when families were gathered, when children came back from school. So when they exploded, they targeted, killed, and injured children, women, families, doctors, nurses. They are not all military; part of them are civilians.
[Redwan Mortada:] And the injuries—I mean, just so people understand the injuries from this explosion. It exploded in people’s faces, so it was destroyed eyeballs, destroyed facial structure and bones, missing fingers. Really, really horrific stuff. I think you experienced—my colleague told me that when you wanted to give a neck mic to one of the children to start the interview, he ran away a bit because it was similar to the pager.
[Rana:] No, they were scared. Yeah, the kids I spoke to were scared, of course. They have PTSD from this device because it looked similar. It’s just horrible. And the other thing, too, is people blinded. If you’re blind, you usually learn to read with your fingers, with Braille, but the pager—the way it exploded, people were holding it, so it also cut off people’s fingers in addition to taking away their sight, so they can’t even learn to read Braille. There are just so many layers of horror that this has impacted, and people are still getting surgeries two years later to fix their faces, if they can ever be fixed. It’s just horrifying and should not be celebrated. But you noted—and again, I encourage people to go watch the documentary because it goes into detail—Israel’s real aim was to have these exploding walkie-talkies kill as many as 20,000 fighters, and it didn’t manage to do that. So obviously they did a lot of damage to Hezbollah, but their ultimate operation failed. But connected to all this: yes, Hezbollah was able to demonstrate it survived, especially watching it fight in 2026. Like you mentioned, there weren’t major assassinations because Israel doesn’t even really know who’s in charge anymore, and they were able to fight the Israelis. However, Israel has managed to occupy a huge portion of Lebanon, and right now Hezbollah is not really responding to Israel’s daily attacks, killings, and bombings—it’s blown up like 60 villages at this point. So where does the battle stand today? Hezbollah has lost ground, Israel is expanding its occupation, and people are wondering why Hezbollah is not responding right now. What, in your opinion, is Hezbollah’s real capability as it stands today, and is there any deterrence left against Israeli aggression?
[Redwan Mortada:] This question should be addressed to Hezbollah, but I will tell you my evaluation of how I’m looking at what’s going on now. In fact, the war did not finish yet. The war is still going on, and the war is not only in Lebanon—the war is in the region, the war between the United States of America and Iran, between Iran and Israel, between Hezbollah and Israel. We are part of this big war in this region. Until now, there are rules of engagement, and the last agreement is still going on, because if you can see in Lebanon, Israel doesn’t dare to target Beirut, to target the Beqaa, to target the Dahieh, because there are rules of engagement between the United States of America and Iran. I think we have to wait and see. During the past 15 months, if you remember, everyone went out and said Hezbollah is done, Hezbollah is finished. But when the battle erupted, we saw another equation on the ground. So I think we are still in the middle of the war; we cannot expect what will go on, whether there will be another round—and that’s what we think, there will be another round, the third round. And we hope that we can survive, we hope that we can kick the Israelis out of our country, because you know that they believe in their myth of Greater Israel, and they believe that and declared that they can take part of Lebanon and part of Syria to fulfill their dream and their myth. So we are fighting with these psychopaths who are now destroying our houses, destroying our lands, killing anyone in that yellow zone in the south of Lebanon. And the United States of America, unfortunately, is backing them and covering them, and our government is involved in this betraying. So let’s wait and see how things will go on.
[Rana:] Well, Redwan, I want to thank you so much for this incredible two-part documentary that you put together. Again, we’ll include a link to it in the description for people to watch, and also for all of the incredible work you do. You really are one of the best journalists we have here in Lebanon. So thank you for all of the wonderful work you do, and hopefully we can have you on again soon.
[Redwan Mortada:] Thank you. Thank you so much.
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