On March 19th The BBC World Service aired an episode of The Global Story which set out to explain who Hezbollah are, and why violence had once again spread to Lebanon.
Redman: “I’m Tristan Redman in London, and today on The Global Story, who are Hezbollah? And how do they keep coming back?”
What followed was a 26 minute exercise in narrative laundering, omission and misinformation, which leant on Israeli actions as causes and the erasure of terrorism to give a polished and legitimate veneer to a brutal, criminal terror proxy.
BBC Middle East correspondent Hugo Bachega was initially asked to explain the beginnings of Hezbollah:
Bachega: “So Hezbollah was created in Lebanon to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon during the Lebanese civil war back in the ‘80’s… and that occupation happened because the Israelis were fighting Palestinian groups based in Southern Lebanon. Large numbers of people in the Shia community were displaced in southern Lebanon because of the Israeli invasion, Shia villages in the south were destroyed. The Shia’s had long been underrepresented in politics here so that’s when Hezbollah emerges.”
The idea is that Hezbollah was a natural, grassroots response to Israeli aggression displacing Shiite Muslims in Southern Lebanon. However, what Bachega fails to point out, beyond the fact that those Israeli actions were responses to cross border PLO attacks, is that Hezbollah was created directly by the Islamic Regime in Iran. As former US Ambassador to Lebanon Jeffrey Feltman put it:
“Hezbollah is the Islamic Republic of Iran’s most successful — and most lethal — export. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps exploited the chaos of Lebanon’s civil war and especially the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon to seed the forces that matured into Hezbollah”
And in their 1985 “open letter” Hezbollah themselves referred to Ayatollah Khomeini as:
“Imam Khomeini the leader”
When Bachega does mention the Islamic regime, it is cast in the role of supporter, rather than ownership:
Bachega: “Hezbollah is obviously supported by Iran. It is financed, backed, armed by Iran, so there is a very strong link between Hezbollah and Iran.”
This framing places Hezbollah as an indigenous Lebanese resistance movement rather than a foreign army keeping Lebanon in a permanent state of war with Israel.
Throughout, Hezbollah’s actions are always framed as response to Israel, even their joining the war after October 7th:
Bachega: “yeah so this was a decision taken by Hezbollah, a decision that now even some of its supporters say was a miscalculation by Hezbollah they decided to show solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza after Israel launched its destructive response to the Hamas attacks”
In fact, Hezbollah joined the war by opening up a northern front on the 8th October in solidarity with Hamas, weeks before the ground invasion of Gaza.
The same pattern shows up in Bachega’s explanation for the current round of fighting:
Bachega: “Yeah, I think the right way to look at this conflict is to understand that this is a long running conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, with lots of chapters, and this particular chapter started when Hezbollah launched, you know, rockets into Israel to respond to the killing of the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini…It was a very symbolic response by Hezbollah, but Israel used, you know, this attack as a justification to carry out large scale attacks against Hezbollah”
Hezbollah’s actions are always reactive, when in reality the opposite is the case. The Israeli action is in response to Hezbollah firing rockets into Israel, but Bachega bats this away as “symbolic”. Nowhere is it mentioned that Hezbollah also fired Shahed drones at Akrotiri, a British military base in Cyprus. An action which cannot be described as caused by Israel and therefore doesn’t fit the narrative.
Many facts about Hezbollah don’t make it into Bachega’s “explainer”. He never mentions hostage taking, suicide bombings, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, atrocities committed in Syria on behalf of Bashar Al Assad, or the killing and displacement of Israeli civilians by Hezbollah attacks. In fact, judging by presenter Asma Khalid’s questioning, one might be in doubt as to whether Hezbollah’s designation as a terrorist organisation was accurate at all:
Khalid: “Hugo we’ve been referring to Hezbollah as a military organisation, one that you say some Lebanese see as a resistance group, it is also designated as a terrorist organisation by countries like the united states and the united kingdom but it strikes me also that there is a political arm of Hezbollah, I mean I remember years ago visiting Lebanon and seeing the Hezbollah flag, it is an organisation that provides sort of political organising and social services for a number of people is that not right?”
Bachega does talk about how Hezbollah has embedded itself into the Lebanese government, but even the language he uses for coercive political violence by Hezbollah in Lebanon is muted and sanitising:
Bachega: “it has a significant parliamentary block and they have been able to essentially dictate policies in this country and they have been very clear in terms of telling people who oppose whatever they want to do that they could suffer the consequences. So they would send you know, armed men into the streets they would sometimes be accused of killing their rivals”
Compare that language to how he describes the pager operation by Israel, arguably one of the most carefully targeted military operations in history:
Bachega: “for almost a year this was a conflict that was largely contained to areas along the border and then everything changed in September 2024 and I think a lot of people remember the pager attacks, it was something that was unthinkable, when pagers that were being used by Hezbollah members, not only fighters but like, teachers, nurses, I met a nurse who had a pager and the pager exploded as he was starting his shift at a hospital and he lost three fingers in one of his hands and some of the pagers exploded when people were you know, with their families, in the supermarket, driving, so that was the beginning of a larger conflict between Israel and Hezbollah”
Rather than questioning why Hezbollah has members operating in schools and hospitals, he chooses to describe the operation as “unthinkable” and escalatory.
In keeping with the passive language Bachega uses for Hezbollah violence, he also glosses neatly over Hezbollah’s flagrant disregard for three ceasefire agreements since 1990, all of which have required the group to disarm:
Bachega: “yeah in 1990 there was a deal that ended the civil war and this deal stipulated that all militias in the country should be disarmed but despite that Hezbollah managed to remain armed”
On 2006: “a United nations resolution called 1701 which demanded Hezbollah’s disarmament, that obviously hasn’t happened”
And on 2024: “the new president has promised to disarm Hezbollah, the problem is that he said we cannot do it by force it needs to be through a diplomatic process. Hezbollah agreed as part of the ceasefire deal to remove its fighters and its weapons from the south of the country, (but) has refused to discuss the future of its weapons elsewhere in the country”
There are two stories here. The one Bachega, Khalid and Redman present on this episode of The Global Story, which is of a grassroots community group reacting to Israeli aggression, and there is the truth hiding in the details, which is of a well-funded and organised foreign army occupying and controlling Lebanon, refusing to disarm and continuously starting wars with Israel, and engaging in brutal acts of criminal violence against civilians in the region and beyond through its criminal networks.
The BBC once again fails to attribute agency to Arab Muslims, casting them as passive and reactive, and in doing so fails in its duty to truth and impartiality.
For an in depth primer on Hezbollah, read Camera colleague Sean Durns’ 2016 article here
