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 foreign relations bombing and the organizations involvement in Syrian civil war supporting the Ba'ath government. Two EU countries have imposed partial or complete prohibitions on Hezbollah. The Netherlands has proscribed the organisation fully, while the United Kingdom has proscribed Hezbollah's paramilitary External Security Organization, but not the organisation's political wing. Switzerland, owing to its Swiss neutrality, does not regard Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. Its government only uses the Sanctions List provided by the United Nations. Dan Gillerman, the Israeli representative at UN, referred to Hezbollah as a "cancerous growth" that must be removed. The Israeli Government considers the use of military