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 armed strength occupation period, and IED attacks increased about 50% each year from 1995 until 2000. On September 29, 1992, the organization launched its first coordinated attack on multiple outposts. In 1993 Hezbollah engaged in a seven day period of intensified fighting with Israel, which resulted in enormous damage to Lebanese infrastructure and civilians but little lasting military harm to either Hezbollah or Israel. The conflict also saw the first major use of unguided Katyusha rockets fired onto civilian Israeli areas by Hezbollah, a tactic used by the PLO a decade before and one which would become a defining practice of Hezbollah