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.

The AMIA bombing was preceded two years earlier by another devastating attack in Buenos Aires. In March 1992, a suicide bomber destroyed the Israeli Embassy, killing 29 people. Argentine authorities similarly attributed responsibility to Hezbollah operating with Iranian support. Then came the AMIA massacre in 1994. Together they demonstrated Hezbollah’s willingness to project violence thousands of kilometres from the Middle East against entirely civilian targets.

Nor did the terrorism stop there.

The organisation has been linked to the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 American servicemen, and the simultaneous attack on French peacekeepers that killed 58 soldiers. It has been implicated in kidnappings of Western hostages throughout the 1980s, attacks against Israeli and Jewish targets overseas, and the 2012 bombing of a bus carrying Israeli tourists in Burgas, Bulgaria, which killed six people. Across four decades, Hezbollah has developed a reputation not merely as a Lebanese militia, but as an Iranian-backed international terrorist network.

Yet Hezbollah’s greatest victims may well be the Lebanese people themselves.

Lebanon was once celebrated as the “Switzerland of the Middle East.” Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East—a thriving centre of commerce, education, banking and culture. It possessed a substantial Christian population and became one of the region’s most pluralistic societies.

That promise has steadily been suffocated.

Armed, financed and directed by Tehran, Hezbollah has evolved into a state within a state. It possesses an arsenal that exceeds that of many sovereign nations, exercises enormous influence over Lebanese politics, and operates independently of the Lebanese Armed Forces. Its military decisions repeatedly draw Lebanon into destructive conflicts, while ordinary Lebanese—Christian, Sunni, Druze and Shia alike—pay the price through economic collapse, political paralysis and repeated war.

Many Lebanese openly acknowledge that their country has effectively been held hostage by Hezbollah for decades. Those who oppose it often do so at considerable personal risk.

This tragedy deserves greater attention in the West. Too often, international commentary reduces Lebanon’s problems to economic mismanagement alone. While corruption is undeniably significant, no serious discussion of Lebanon’s decline can ignore the destabilising role played by an armed organisation that answers not to Beirut, but to Tehran.

Australia’s decision to list Hezbollah in its entirety reflected precisely this reality. The listing makes it an offence under Australian law to support, finance or associate with the organisation in ways prohibited under counter-terrorism legislation. Similar legal frameworks exist in the United States and the United Kingdom because these governments concluded that Hezbollah’s political activities cannot be meaningfully separated from its terrorist activities.

The future, however, need not be bleak.

Across the Middle East, the Abraham Accords demonstrated that old assumptions can be overturned. The agreements between Israel and several Arab states showed that cooperation, economic integration and shared security interests can prevail over decades of hostility. Supporters of President Donald Trump often point to the Accords as one of the most significant diplomatic achievements in the region in recent decades, arguing that they created a framework capable of expanding further if Iranian influence continues to recede.

Many observers hope that one day Lebanon itself might be liberated from Hezbollah’s grip and able to pursue peace, prosperity and normal relations with its neighbours. Such a future would benefit not only Israelis, but millions of Lebanese whose aspirations have long been subordinated to an armed movement serving foreign strategic interests.

The victims of the AMIA bombing deserve remembrance not simply because of what happened in Buenos Aires thirty-two years ago, but because their murders remind us of an enduring truth: terrorism rarely confines itself to one country. It spreads where it is tolerated, financed or excused.

Remembering AMIA is therefore not merely an act of historical memory. It is a warning.

Colonel Michael Scott CSC Ret’d is a former Australian army officer and the founder of The 2023 Foundation, an initiative dedicated to combating antisemitism.