Hezbollah

Hezbollah ('Party of God') was founded in 1982 by Lebanese Shia clerics with organisational, financial, and military support from Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, in the vacuum left by Israel's invasion of Lebanon and the PLO's expulsion. It grew from a militia resisting Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon into a parallel state-within-a-state, combining an armed wing that fought Israel to a stalemate in the 2006 Lebanon War with a political party holding seats in the Lebanese parliament and cabinet, and a network of social services in Shia areas of Lebanon. As the flagship of Iran's 'Axis of Resistance,' it also deployed fighters to Syria in support of the Assad regime during the Syrian Civil War. The organisation suffered its most severe setback in the 2024 Israel-Hezbollah War, which killed Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah and much of its senior command and destroyed a large share of its precision-missile arsenal, a degradation later cited as a precondition for both the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024 and Iran's weakened position in its 2025-2026 confrontations with Israel and the United States.

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