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 The United States, France, the Gulf Cooperation Council, Canada, the Netherlands, and Israel have classified Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. In early 2015, the US Director of National Intelligence removed Hezbollah from the list of "active terrorist threats" against the United States while Hezbollah remained designated as terrorist by the US, and by mid 2015 several Hezbollah officials were sanctioned by the US for their role in facilitating military activity in the ongoing Syrian Civil War. The European Union, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Australia have proscribed Hezbollah's military wing, but do not list Hezbollah as a whole as