Hezbollah European Union. After the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 in support of the Free Lebanon State, Israel occupied a strip of south Lebanon, which was controlled by the South Lebanon Army (SLA), a Lebanese Christian militia supported by Israel. Hezbollah was founded in the early 1980s as part of an Iranian effort to aggregate a variety of militant Lebanese Shi'a groups into a unified organization. Hezbollah acts as a proxy for Iran in the ongoing Iran–Israel proxy conflict. Hezbollah was conceived by Muslim clerics and funded by Iran primarily to harass the Israeli occupation. Its leaders were followers of
Hezbollah International Financing Prevention Act of 2014 the Gulf Cooperation Council, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, the European Union and Israel classify Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, in whole or in part. The governments of Iran, Russia and China do not share this view of the organization. The United States designated Hezbollah as a terrorist organization in 1995. "This summary is based largely on the summary provided by the Congressional Research Service, a public domain source." The Hezbollah International Financing Prevention Act of 2014 would state that it shall be U.S. policy to: (1) prevent Hezbollah's global logistics and financial network from operating in order to