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 armed strength occupation period, and IED attacks increased about 50% each year from 1995 until 2000. On September 29, 1992, the organization launched its first coordinated attack on multiple outposts. In 1993 Hezbollah engaged in a seven day period of intensified fighting with Israel, which resulted in enormous damage to Lebanese infrastructure and civilians but little lasting military harm to either Hezbollah or Israel. The conflict also saw the first major use of unguided Katyusha rockets fired onto civilian Israeli areas by Hezbollah, a tactic used by the PLO a decade before and one which would become a defining practice of Hezbollah