Proscription of Hezbollah

Lord Spellar Excerpts

Thursday 25th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Joan Ryan]

The hon. Gentleman makes a powerful point with which I absolutely agree. I will come to it a little later.

Hezbollah is a menace throughout the middle east, but Israel is its principal target. That is no secret. In its founding manifesto in 1985, in which it also pledged its loyalty to Ayatollah Khomeini and urged the establishment of an Islamic regime, Hezbollah says of Israel:

“Our struggle will end only when this entity is obliterated… We recognise no treaty with it, no cease-fire, and no peace agreements, whether separate or consolidated.”

This is no mere rhetorical sabre-rattling; Hezbollah vehemently opposed the Oslo peace process and has fought any normalisation of relations between Israel and Arab countries. On numerous occasions—most notably in 1993, 1996 and 2006—it has sought to provoke conflict with Israel, and the consequences have been disastrous and devastating for the peoples of both Israel and Lebanon.

In 2006, Hezbollah kidnapped and murdered Israeli soldiers on the country’s northern border and proceeded to launch Katyusha rockets to indiscriminately pound the Jewish state. The resulting conflict led to large numbers of civilian casualties and the evacuation of several hundred thousand people. In defiance of UN resolution 1701, which brought the conflict to an end, Hezbollah has spent the last decade restocking its arsenal and rebuilding its forces in Lebanon. It has trebled the size of its fighting force from 17,000 to 45,000 men. It has launched an arms procurement programme, amassing short, medium and long-range missiles and rockets, drones, precision-guided projectiles, anti-tank weaponry and ballistic missiles. It now has an estimated 120,000 to 140,000 rockets and missiles—an arsenal larger than that of many states.

That Hezbollah has been allowed to replenish and then expand its armoury in this manner represents a terrible failure on the part of the international community, a breaking of the assurances provided to Israel and a betrayal of the people of Lebanon and Israel. The implications are truly horrifying. Andrew Exum, an expert on the region and President Obama’s former deputy assistant secretary of defence for middle east policy, wrote recently:

“I shudder to think what the next conflict will look like.”

Hezbollah has no qualms about such a war. It does not care about the loss of thousands of civilian lives—of Israelis, Lebanese, Jews, Muslims and Christians—that its aggression will lead to.

Quite deliberately, Hezbollah has embedded its forces and weaponry in towns and villages, turning the people of southern Lebanon into human shields. Quite deliberately, it will, as it has done in the past, target civilian population centres in Israel, even vowing, in the words of Nasrallah, that there will be “no red lines” in any future conflict—he underlined the pledge with threats to attack the Dimona nuclear reactor and the ammonia storage facility in Haifa. Quite deliberately, it will seek to draw in other regional actors. Its capacity may be many times greater than those of other terrorist groups, but its aim—to instil terror by inflicting mass civilian casualties—is the same as that of those who wage attacks on targets big and small throughout the world, and of those who attacked London Bridge, the Manchester arena and this House only last year.

Hezbollah has not simply exported terror globally and wreaked havoc in Israel and Lebanon; its bloody fingerprints are all over the Syrian civil war, the most brutal conflict of this century. In 2016, it was estimated that more than a quarter of Hezbollah’s forces were engaged in fighting on behalf of the murderous Assad regime. It has not only contributed to the killing fields of Aleppo and Homs; it has helped to eliminate the non-extremist opposition to Assad, thus contributing to the ranks of Sunni jihadists and stirring sectarian hatred.

Hezbollah has indeed become Iran’s indispensable partner—the Blackwater of Iran, as some have labelled it—helping to promote and further Tehran’s expansionist agenda throughout the middle east, in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Such a vast enterprise cannot be run on the cheap, so in addition to the vast sums of weaponry and cash lavished on it by Iran, the party of God is now engaged in money laundering, arms sales and drugs smuggling. It works through informal networks and centrally run enterprises. The latter, one leading middle east expert told the US Congress last summer, were operating like “international organised criminal entities”.

[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

Do not the various elements that my right hon. Friend is describing show the indivisible nature of Hezbollah? It does not have separate wings but is one criminal terrorist entity.

[Joan Ryan]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is a distinction that Hezbollah not only does not recognise but denies.

As the House will be aware, the British Government have long held the view that Hezbollah’s military wing is involved in conducting and supporting terrorism. In 2001, the Hezbollah External Security Organisation was added to the list of proscribed organisations. In 2008, this proscription was extended by a reference to the

“military wing of Hezbollah, including the Jihad Council and all units reporting to it (including the Hezbollah External Security Organisation)”.

Hezbollah’s political wing, however, is not proscribed, even though this distinction is not one that Hezbollah itself has ever recognised.