People wave Hezbollah flags during the funeral of a Shiite party fighter, Hani Ezzeddine, in Ghobeiry in the southern suburbs of Beirut, on Sept. 11, 2024. (Credit: Mohammad Yassine)
The U.S. Treasury Department announced Wednesday that it sanctioned a Lebanese network accused of smuggling oil and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) to help finance Hezbollah. The sanctions target three individuals, five companies and two vessels that the Treasury said were "supervised by a senior member of Hezbollah's finance team and used profits from illicit LPG shipments to Syria to help generate revenue" for the group led by Hassan Nasrallah.
Network linked to the Assad regime
One of the individuals targeted is Mohammad Ibrahim Habib al-Sayed, “a Hezbollah official” who allegedly “coordinated potential oil transactions for the financial team” of the party, the Treasury said. He also allegedly served as an interlocutor between Mohammad Kassem Bazzal, a Hezbollah member already sanctioned by Washington in 2018, and Lebanese businessman Ali Nayef Zgheib on “an oil project at a refinery site in Zahrani,” in southern Lebanon.
Zgheib allegedly “secured storage tanks, probably for oil, on behalf of Hezbollah,” the Treasury continued. He also allegedly “met with at least one member of the Lebanese Parliament affiliated with Hezbollah to discuss financing for the oil projects” of Hezbollah. Finally, a second “Lebanese businessman, Boutros Georges Obeid, is also involved in Hezbollah’s energy transactions and jointly owns several companies with Zgheib.”
According to the U.S. Treasury, this network has "facilitated dozens of LPG deliveries to the Syrian government, working with the official Yasser Ibrahim," sanctioned by Washington since 2020. Ibrahim is an economic adviser to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, according to an article on the Syria Report website, published in 2022.
In the U.S. Treasury statement, Bradley Smith, the undersecretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, stressed that Hezbollah "continues to launch rockets into Israel and fuel regional instability, choosing to prioritize funding violence over caring for the people it claims to care about, including the tens of thousands of displaced people in southern Lebanon."
The party and Israel have been fighting since Oct. 8, 2023 in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa, in the wake of the ongoing war in Gaza between the Hebrew state and Hamas.
The United States regularly imposes sanctions on Hezbollah and its allies in the region. Founded in 1982 by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and designated by the United States and other Western countries as a “terrorist organization,” the party has a heavily armed militia that has fought several wars against Israel. It gained strength after joining the war in Syria in 2012 in support of President Bashar al-Assad.
This article originally appeared in French in L'Orient-Le Jour.