TEL AVIV – The Arab Parliament on Sunday declared the Lebanon-based group Hezbollah a terrorist organization following the Arab League and Gulf Cooperation Council’s similar announcements last month.
Parliament Speaker Ahmed al-Jarwan condemned Hezbollah for “undermining the security of many countries in the region,” noting its “interferences” in the Syrian civil war.
He added, however, that he hoped the terror group would continue its fight against Israel.
“We hope Hezbollah points its weapons at Israel,” al-Jarwan is quoted as saying by Lebanon’s Naharnet news website.
Hezbollah was created by Iran in the 1980s with the purpose of destroying Israel. The terror group has a weapons cache that includes more than 100,000 rockets and missiles directed at the Jewish state.
Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah threatened last month to blow up an ammonia storage facility in the northern Israeli city of Haifa, but despite bragging that it would be “an atomic bomb” scenario, IDF officials said such an attack would not have disastrous consequences.
The 22-member Arab Parliament slammed the “direct Iranian interference and the indirect Hezbollah interference in the affairs of the Arab countries.”
On Wednesday, Breitbart Jerusalem reported that factions within Lebanon itself are questioning Hezbollah’s reason for existence, accusing the group of becoming nothing more than a “mercenary occupier” with the aim of destroying Lebanon and the Arab world at large.
Both the European Union and the U.S. recognize Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. Last year, however, a U.S. intelligence report removed the group from its list of terror threats to the United States.