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 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"),