Top EU Diplomat Meets With Hezbollah Terror Group As War in Lebanon Looms

Top EU diplomat Josep Borrell has met with  Hezbollah’s parliamentary wing in Beirut, staged amid an ongoing assault on Israel by the Iranian-backed terrorist organisation.

The High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy sat down with Mohammad Raad—a Hezbollah MP in the Lebanese Parliament—Saturday, claiming the discussions were designed to prevent the war in Gaza from spilling into Lebanon. Bizarrely, this claim coincided with large-scale Hezbollah rocket attacks into Israel, fired across Lebanon’s southern border.

After meeting various Lebanese officials as part of a three-day visit, Borrell declared that Hezbollah was not “seeking war”:

My impression, which I hope is not wrong, is that they are perfectly aware of the seriousness of the situation and the consequences that a greater confrontation would have, which could drag Iran into it.

Active in the Syrian Civil War the past decade, Hezbollah receives substantial Iranian backing and is in effective control of large swathes of Lebanon, often engaging in asymmetric warfare against the Israeli Defence Forces. Hezbollah’s documented military ties with Hamas led Israeli officials to identify the Lebanese group as complicit in the October 7th terror attacks on Israeli civilians.

There is now growing diplomatic speculation that the Netanyahu government may soon commence a military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The Spanish Eurocrat and Socialist Party (PSOE) veteran added that the risk of Iran becoming embroiled directly in a broader regional conflict was an added incentive for Hezbollah not to expand the conflict, saying that the group was aware of the geopolitical implications of war with Israel.

The view that the Shiite militants are aiming to avoid conflict is at odds with their intensive campaign of cross-border violence in support of the Hamas-led October 7th massacres. The meeting itself came just days after the assassination of Hamas’s second in command by Israel in Beirut. By Monday, it was also reported that a senior Hezbollah commander Wissam Hassan Tawil was killed in an Israeli drone strike in southern Lebanon.

Far from avoiding war, the group itself has continued to fire rockets across the Lebanese southern border with Israel.

Borrell’s meeting with Hezbollah also prompted concern because multiple EU member states —including Germany and Austria—categorise the Shia hardliners as a proscribed terrorist organisation. The EU itself partially added Hezbollah to the terror list for its role in a 2012 bus bombing against Israeli tourists in Bulgaria. Following the October 7th attacks, over 500 MEPs added their names to a non-binding resolution in the European Parliament to officially ban Hezbollah on an EU level, along with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Speaking to the Israeli press, an anonymous EU source defended the diplomatic liaisons with Hezbollah saying that Brussels would speak to “all relevant political representatives who have influence on the situation on the ground or have a stake in it.”