Hezbollah foreign relations fashion of bin Laden, we do not endorse them. And many of the operations that they have carried out, we condemned them very clearly." Michel Samaha, Lebanon's former minister of information, has said that Hezbollah has been an important ally of the government in the war against terrorist groups, and described the "American attempt to link Hezbollah to al-Qaeda" to be "astonishing". As part of a surge of intersectarian support for Hezbollah during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict, Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's deputy leader, called for Muslims to rise up in a holy war against Zionists and join the fighting in Lebanon.
Hezbollah foreign relations when he said, "It is making no effort to hit military targets; it's just a broadside against civilian targets." On the other end of the spectrum, there are some in the United Nations who deny that Hezbollah's military activities against civilians are terrorist in nature at all. In a 20 July 2006 article, scholar Fred Halliday wrote that Sheikh Naim Qassem, deputy leader of Hezbollah under Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, told him Hezbollah follows Iran's leadership as a matter of principle. In an interview on Al-Arabiya TV in Dubai, former Hezbollah Secretary-General Subhi Al-Tufeili said Hezbollah definitely fosters its relations with