It’s listed as a foreign terrorist organization by more than 60 countries around the world, including Canada, the United States, the European Union, the Arab League and the Persian Gulf states. For more than 40 years, it has plotted or carried out terror attacks in Israel, Bulgaria, Thailand, the U.S., Argentina, and elsewhere.
Hezbollah, the “Party of God,” isn’t just Israel’s problem.
In its early years, it specialized in suicide bombings and assassinations. By 2012 it had moved on to large-scale military operations in Syria. By the time it launched the first of more than 11,000 missiles and rockets into Israel from its bases in Lebanon on Oct. 8 last year, Hezbollah had evolved into the world’s most heavily armed non-state military force. Israel, with more than 60,000 of its citizens still evacuated from the towns around its northern frontier, made a decision three weeks ago. Enough is enough.
By last weekend, Hezbollah’s cunning and charismatic leader Hassan Nasrallah was dead along with 19 of his uppermost officials and commanders following an Israeli strike on the bunker where he was holding court. Thousands of Hezbollah fighters had already been killed or gravely wounded in a wave of high-tech, pinpoint detonations of Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies that Israel had put into motion on Sept. 17.
Over the space of two weeks, the political and military entity that had been the most ruthlessly effective and powerful terrorist organization in the fratricidal Islamist dystopia of the Greater Middle East had been reduced to a scattered, broken and humiliated shell.
Hezbollah is down, but it’s not out. Its Iranian-supplied arsenal of long-range missiles is believed to be mostly intact, and it has survived decapitation before. Nasrallah’s predecessor, Abbas al-Musawi, was eliminated by the Israeli Air Force in 1992.
Nasrallah was the beloved confidant of Hezbollah’s chief benefactor, Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei, and over the years he’d built Hezbollah into a ruthless and disciplined political force within Lebanon. Hezbollah wields enormous power in the country, which has been without a president for two years.
A dozen parliamentary votes in a row have failed to elect a successor to the ineffectual president Michel Aoun, whose term expired in 2022. A caretaker government barely governs. Lebanon had already defaulted on its foreign debt the year before its crippled financial system finally collapsed when Beirut’s port was obliterated in an explosion in 2020.
Hezbollah maneuvers efficiently and ruthlessly within Lebanon’s dysfunctional political system, which apportions offices between the country’s Muslim and Christian affiliations in the absence of a reliable census since the 1930s. Hezbollah exerts a stranglehold on the country’s Shia Muslims, who account for roughly a third of Lebanon’s 5.8 million people.
In a parallel system, Hezbollah runs its own fortified “state within a state,” in Lebanon’s south. It’s a testament to the United Nations’ uselessness and the folly of incessant “ceasefire” demands that there are 10,000 peacekeepers from the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) there.
Since 2006, the peacekeepers’ job has been to keep arms out of the area and keep Hezbollah away from the Israeli border and see to it that Hezbollah doesn’t rain rockets down into Israel. But Hezbollah routinely targets UNIFIL patrols with roadside bombs, just to show them who’s boss.
At least 1.5 million of Lebanon’s people are refugees from the carnage of the civil wars in Syria, where Hezbollah has run ethnic cleansing operations on behalf of the Baathist dictator and Khomeinist satrap Bashar Assad. But Hezbollah hasn’t confined its terrorism to the immediate neighbourhood. Not by a long shot.
Just as Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps runs terror operations through its Quds Force, Hezbollah has its own overseas Islamic Jihad Organization, known as Unit 910.
Last December, federal prosecutors in New York finally brought charges against the Hezbollah plotter behind the 1994 suicide bombing of the Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, that resulted in the deaths of 85 people. Justice department lawyers identified the Hezbollah commander Salman El Reda as the key figure in the operation. El Reda remains at large.
In April, an Argentine Court tied the community centre atrocity to another bombing two years earlier at Israel’s embassy in Argentina that left 29 people dead. Hezbollah carried out the operation on behalf of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the judges found. A day after the 1994 bombing, a device exploded on a domestic flight in Panama, killing all 21 people aboard. Prosecutors in Argentina say the same Hezbollah operative was involved. El Reda has also been fingered in a bomb plot in Peru in 2014, and in 2009 he is alleged to have travelled to Thailand to scuttle a bomb-making operation that had attracted the attention of Thai police.
The U.S. Director of National Intelligence has identified dozens of Hezbollah plots and attacks far from the Middle East.
In Burgas, Bulgaria, six Israeli tourists and their driver were killed in a Hezbollah bus bombing in July, 2012. In Kano, Nigeria in May, 2013, three Hezbollah operatives were arrested with a cache of rocket-propelled grenades, anti-tank weapons and a large amount of explosives. At the Khobar Towers in Dahran, Saudi Arabia, in June, 1996, a truck bomb killed 19 Americans and wounded 372 others. In September, 1992, in Berlin, four Iranian Kurdish dissidents were assassinated in a cafe. In April, 1988, Two Kuwaitis were killed during the hijacking of a Kuwait Airways flight. Air Afrique flight 56 out of Rome was hijacked in July 1987, and a passenger was killed.
Hezbollah has also been implicated in numerous drug-smuggling and money-laundering operations involving Colombian cartels and Mexican gangs.
Now that Iran has retaliated against Israel with hundreds of ballistic missiles that resulted in a single death — a Palestinian, in Jericho — and Hezbollah’s statelet in south Lebanon is being besieged by the IDF, there’s always the possibility that Unit 910 will be put in high gear again.
But after nearly a year of Hezbollah rockets raining from the skies in northern Israel, something had to be done. This should never have been Israel’s problem to solve in the first place.
National Post