The terrorist army that has held Lebanon hostage

On 18 July 1994, at precisely 9:53am, an explosives-laden van detonated outside the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) building in Buenos Aires. Within seconds, the headquarters of Latin America’s largest Jewish community lay in ruins. Eighty-five innocent people were murdered. More than 300 were injured. It remains the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentina’s history. Argentine investigators, prosecutors and intelligence agencies concluded that the attack was orchestrated by senior figures in the Iranian regime and carried out by Hezbollah operatives. Three decades later, justice remains elusive.

The AMIA bombing was not an isolated outrage. It was part of a long and bloody pattern of international terrorism that has made Hezbollah one of the world’s most dangerous militant organisations.

Hezbollah—literally “The Party of God”—was established in Lebanon in the early 1980s with the financial, military and ideological backing of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). While it presents itself as both a political party and a social movement, its military wing has conducted terrorist attacks across multiple continents, targeting civilians, diplomats, Jewish institutions, military personnel and political opponents. The Australian Government assesses that Hezbollah is directly or indirectly engaged in preparing, planning, assisting and fostering terrorist acts. Since December 2021, Australia has listed the entirety of Hezbollah—not merely a so-called military wing—as a terrorist organisation under the Criminal Code. The United States and the United Kingdom likewise designate the organisation in its entirety as a terrorist organisation.

This distinction matters.

For many years, some governments attempted to separate Hezbollah’s “political” and “military” wings. Increasingly, that distinction has been rejected as artificial. Hezbollah’s own leadership has repeatedly made clear that it is one unified organisation with one command structure.