Hizbullah

Hizbullah (Arabic: Ḥizb Allāh, "Party of God"; also transliterated Hezbollah) emerged in Lebanon during the early 1980s amid the Lebanese civil war and the Israeli invasion of 1982. It was formally announced in an open letter in 1985 that identified Iran's Supreme Leader as a spiritual reference and called for resistance to Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. The organization received early ideological and material backing from Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and it has maintained close ties with Damascus.

Hizbullah operates on two tracks. Politically, it has competed in Lebanese parliamentary elections since 1992 and has held cabinet seats in multiple Lebanese governments, often in coalition with the Amal Movement and other allies under the "March 8" bloc. Militarily, it maintains an armed wing independent of the Lebanese Armed Forces, a status it justifies by reference to "resistance" against Israel. Its forces fought Israel in the 2006 Lebanon War, which ended with UN Security Council Resolution 1701, and it deployed fighters to Syria from around 2012 in support of the Assad government.

The movement's long-time secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, led the organization from 1992 until he was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Beirut's southern suburbs in September 2024, during a major escalation that followed cross-border exchanges linked to the Gaza war. Naim Qassem was subsequently named his successor.

Designations vary by jurisdiction. The United States designated Hizbullah a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 1997. The European Union in 2013 listed its "military wing" but not the political wing. The United Kingdom proscribed the entire organization in 2019. The Arab League designated it a terrorist group in 2016, though Lebanon and Iraq dissented. Russia, China, and Iran do not treat it as a terrorist entity.

Hizbullah also runs extensive social services in Shia-majority areas of Lebanon, including schools, clinics, and the Al-Manar satellite channel.