Hezbollah Official: “Israel Is The Main Enemy”

Tony Badran, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, explained a possible reason that Hezbollah still fights Israel years after Israel left Lebanon is because it is an “emulation of Hezbollah which existed in Iran.” Badran who was analyzing a different speech of Qassem’s, wrote that Hezbollah was not formed initially to fight Israel’s presence in Lebanon, rather its “genesis is related to the network of Iranian revolutionary cadres, especially those loyal to Imam Ruhollah Khomeini, who were operating in Lebanon in the 1970s.”