Leaders of the terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, all groups funded by Iran, the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, met on Wednesday in Lebanon, where Hezbollah is located.
Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah met with Hamas deputy chief Saleh Al-Arouri and Palestinian Islamic Jihad head Ziad al-Nakhala. A portrait of Iran’s original Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and another portrait of Iran’s current Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, were on the wall behind them.
Al-Arouri declared in 2014 at the fourth conference of the World Union of Islamic Sages (held in Turkey) that Hamas was responsible for the abduction and murder of three Jewish teenagers, Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaer, and Naftali Fraenkel, saying, “The struggle of the masses has grown to include all the occupied lands. It reached a height in the heroic action carried out by the [Izz al-Din] al-Qassam Brigades, which captured three settlers in Hebron.”
Nasrallah said in 2008 that “Israel will be destroyed in a few years.” In 2020, he said, “When Khomeini declared Al Quds Day in 1979, it was a culmination point of his personal struggle against Israel, which he began addressing in 1960. Khamenei was restating the position of Najaf and Qom regarding Palestine, a position that remains a consistent position until the present. This position is that Palestine from river to sea must be liberated. Israel has no legitimacy to exist at all and must be destroyed.”
Al-Nakhala said in 2018, “I’m sure we will defeat the Zionist project, and this entity will disappear.”
Hezbollah and Hamas were placed on the U.S. State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations on October 8, 1997; Palestine Islamic Jihad was designated a foreign terrorist organization in 1997.
In October 1983, the U.S. military suffered the single deadliest day since the Vietnam War when 246 American troops were murdered in a terrorist bombing at their Beirut, Lebanon, barracks.
In 2012, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia noted of the attack:
In 1983, high-ranking members of Hezbollah and a member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, acting at the direction of the Iranian Ambassador to Syria, met in Baalbek, Lebanon. At this meeting, the individuals “formed a plan to carry out simultaneous attacks against the American and French barracks in Lebanon.” Subsequent to these discussions, members of Hezbollah disguised a 19-ton truck to resemble a water delivery truck that regularly traveled to the Beirut International Airport, near the U.S. Marine barracks, and rigged the truck so that it could carry an explosive device. On the morning of October 23, 1983, a group of Hezbollah operatives ambushed the real water delivery truck, and the fake truck was sent to the barracks, driven by an Iranian member of Hezbollah. Upon reaching the barracks, the fake truck increased its speed and broke through the wire and sandbag barriers surrounding the facility. Once the truck reached the center of the barracks, the bomb it carried was detonated.