Watch "Hezbollah's Hostages," a New CPC Docuseries
The awaited sequel to "Whispered in Gaza" exposes Hezbollah's war to subjugate Arab lands — through the eyes of its Arab victims and dissenters.
Empowering Silenced Voices
Animated for Their Protection, Hezbollah’s Arab Opponents Send the World a Message
An eight-part weekly series of harrowing testimony from Lebanon and Syria will be aired by The Free Press in English and by leading pan-Arab TV network Al-Arabiya in Arabic.
Hezbollah’s war on Israel obscures its larger campaign to subjugate much of the region — as a tyrant in Lebanon, an occupier in Syria, a mafia of sex and drug trafficking, and the nerve center of Iran’s Arab empire. Millions of Arabs whose lives the militia has shattered want a different future. Hezbollah does not want the world to hear their voices.
Hezbollah’s Hostages, a series of eight documentary shorts produced by the Center for Peace Communications, features the recorded testimony of Lebanese and Syrian civilians in Hezbollah’s grip. It stems from over a year’s investigation which yielded rare interviews with Hezbollah fighters, their Arab victims, and brave dissidents struggling against overwhelming odds. To protect interviewees from retribution and grippingly portray their testimony, each interview recording is accompanied by creative images and animation.
The English-subtitled version is being distributed exclusively by The Free Press on all its platforms. The Arabic edition of each episode is airing weekly on the leading pan-Arab TV network Alarabiya — via its news channel Al-Hadath — alongside a panel discussion of its content.
Click here to watch episode one, “The Combatant” — the story of a Lebanese Shi’ite boy transfixed by American action movies who is lured into combat by Hezbollah as it enters the Syrian civil war. The fables he was told about a sacred mission meet bitter reality on the battlefield. He undergoes a profound change of heart and mind that leads him to an improbable new life.
In weekly episodes ahead, we breach Hezbollah’s criminal underworld through unprecedented testimony from a mule in its drug trade and a woman abducted, raped, and enslaved by its fighters. We also probe the Hezbollah stronghold of Dahiyeh, just outside Beirut, with help from Shi’ite civilians who live there.
Dahiyeh is the shadow capital of Lebanon — home of Hezbollah’s intelligence apparatus, politburo, and prisons — as well as the central node to all Iran’s proxies in the region, from the Houthis of Yemen to Iraq’s militias to Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas. Yet the same landscape is also home to some of Hezbollah’s many opponents – and in later episodes, we meet them too: Shi’ite veterans of the countrywide 2019 street protests, who dared to demand a different future; civic activists striving to end the war on Israel, liberate young minds, and restore the rule of law in Lebanon.
Whispered in Gaza, our last animated series, predated the October 7 tragedy by nine months, offering a wakeup call to confront Hamas by confronting the lies it tells about itself. In engaging the more powerful Hezbollah, we believe the best defense from its assault entails unmasking its pretensions of “resistance,” exposing its oppression of Arab peoples, and rallying its victims across the region. By lending an ear to Hezbollah’s many hostages, we show that they are not alone.
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