Beirut, Lebanon – Last week, Hezbollah announced it would provide financial support to families in Lebanon who had lost their homes in the latest war with Israel. Hezbollah has a long history of providing financial and other support for constituents and compensating those who have lost their homes to Israeli bombing. And while the group has historically received Iranian funding, it also has independent funding pathways allowing it to support members of its base, who are predominantly Lebanese Shia.
But analysts said Hezbollah’s latest distribution drive, announced on October 13, is increasing pressure on the Lebanese government, which has sought to counter the group’s influence in the country. Last week, the government seized hundreds of kilogrammes of explosives linked to Hezbollah. Hezbollah MP Hassan Fadlallah said the stockpile belongs to the axis of resistance against Israel and demanded that it be handed back and those arrested be released.
Meanwhile, Ali Damoush, the group’s executive council chairman, said on Tuesday Hezbollah would continue to support its constituents who have been on the front lines of the war with Israel. Damoush said the payments were aimed at “displaced people and those whose homes had been destroyed or severely damaged to the point of becoming uninhabitable”. This follows a report by the news agency claiming that Iran had provided Hezbollah with $200m in an effort to ease the burden on Lebanon’s Shia population, after three years of devastating war with Israel.
At the height of the war, which began on October 8, 2023, there were as many as 1.2 million people displaced, with about 9,000 Lebanese killed. A United States Department of State official denied that Iran, under stringent economic pressure, was able to transfer the funds to its Lebanese ally. Nicholas Blanford, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and author of a book about Hezbollah, told Al Jazeera that the funds would be a huge boon to the group.
Hezbollah is very sensitive towards the needs of their support base, the Shia community, and I think that’s one of the reasons why they haven’t gone back to fighting the Israelis,” he said. Hours earlier, Hezbollah had attacked Israel for the first time in more than a year after joint US-Israeli strikes on Tehran killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, an ally of the group. It also said Israel’s repeated violations of a 2024 ceasefire in southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah has traditionally had a strong presence, were another factor in opening up the war.
In the following days, Israel reinvaded southern Lebanon, displacing more than a million people from their homes and killing about 4,300 since then. Israeli forces began their widespread aerial attacks on Lebanese villages and towns, which they claimed contained Hezbollah positions, with growing intensity. In June, a US-brokered trilateral framework was agreed between Israel and Lebanon.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
