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 sanctified, although it does not extend these values to groups who have relations with Israel. In 1997 Hezbollah formed the multi-confessional Lebanese Brigades to Fighting the Israeli Occupation in an attempt to revive national and secular resistance against Israel, thereby marking the "Lebanonisation" of resistance. Whether the Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO) was a "nom de guerre" used by Hezbollah or a separate organization, is disputed. According to certain sources, IJO was identified as merely a "telephone organization", and whose name was "used by those involved to disguise their true identity." Hezbollah reportedly also used another name, "Islamic Resistance" ("al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya"),