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
2012 Cyprus terrorist plot 2012 Cyprus terrorist plot On July 7, 2012, local authorities arrested Lebanese-born Swedish citizen Hossam Yaakoub in Limassol, Cyprus. Yaakoub admitted to being a member of the Shi'a Islamic militant group Hezbollah, who had been tasked with surveilling the activities of Israeli tourists on the island. Israel condemned the incident as an attempted terrorist attack. In the months preceding the disruption of the terrorist plot in Cyprus, Hezbollah and Iran were implicated in terrorist attacks and plots against Israeli targets in Thailand, India, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Kenya. On July 18, eleven days after Yaakoub was arrested, five Israeli tourists and