The militant group is a dominant force in the country, and officials have struggled for decades to limit its power.
Israel launched more than 1,000 airstrikes against Lebanon this week in an attempt to weaken Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that has been exchanging missile barrages with Israel for nearly a year.
But fighting Hezbollah is not a straightforward task. The group is also a Shiite Muslim political party, backed by Iran, with an influential role in Lebanon’s faction-ridden political system. It provides social services to a large base of supporters. And its fighters and missiles are hidden among Lebanon’s civilian population.
“Israel’s war is not with you,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Lebanese people this week. “It’s with Hezbollah.”
But it’s not always clear where Hezbollah ends and Lebanon begins. The group, which the United States and many other countries consider a terrorist organization, is a dominant political and military power in the country.
The name Hezbollah (pronounced hez-bo-llah) is Arabic for “Party of God.” The group was founded, with help from Iran, to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon that began in 1982 during the country’s civil war. The United States believes that an early incarnation of the group also played a role in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut.
As the Lebanese civil war drew to a close in 1990, the group was allowed to keep its weapons as part of the peace deal, even as Lebanon’s other religious sects were forced to disarm. Hezbollah argued that its weapons were necessary to protect Lebanon and the group continued to launch guerrilla attacks on Israeli forces in southern Lebanon until they withdrew in 2000.
