WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States imposed sanctions Wednesday on a Lebanese environmental organization it accused of being an arm of the Hezbollah terror group.
The US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control designated Green Without Borders (GWB) and its leader, Zuhair Subhi Nahla, for allegedly providing support and cover to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon along the “Blue Line” boundary between Lebanon and Israel “while operating under the guise of environmental activism.”
The Treasury Department said GWB outposts are manned by Hezbollah operatives, serving as cover for the terror group’s warehouses and munitions tunnels. Workers at the outposts have allegedly prevented UN peacekeepers in Lebanon from accessing areas that the United Nations is supposed to be able to reach.
GWB was established in 2013, and it claims that it aims to protect Lebanon’s green areas and plant trees. “We are not an arm for anyone,” Nahla told The Associated Press in January. “We, as an environmental association, work for all the people and we are not politicized.”
GWB sites “have been used to conduct Hezbollah weapons training, to provide support for Hezbollah’s activities along the Blue Line in southern Lebanon and to impede the freedom of movement of the UN Security Council-mandated United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL),” the State Department said, adding that the sanctions are “part of our efforts to prevent and disrupt financial and other support for terrorist attacks in Lebanon, Israel, and around the world.”
Brian E. Nelson, the Treasury Department’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said the US rejects Hezbollah’s “cynical efforts to cloak its destabilizing terrorist activities with false environmentalism.”
An installation of the Lebanese agricultural NGO ‘Green Without Borders’ that the IDF says serves as an observation outpost for Hezbollah on the Israeli-Lebanese border, publicized on June 22, 2017. (Israel Defense Forces)
Already in 2017, IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, who at the time was head of the IDF Military Intelligence, revealed Hezbollah’s use of the GWB as a cover for its activities, in violation of the ceasefire with Israel.
In February 2020, the Israeli Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center published a report denouncing the environmental group’s affiliation with Hezbollah’s civilian institutions and the fact that some of the trees it planted near the Israeli border were named after slain Hezbollah fighters.
The US decision to sanction GWB came amid heightened tensions along the Blue Line, as Israeli security officials believe Hezbollah is looking to take advantage of societal schisms caused by the government’s judicial overhaul, including the decision by thousands of active reservists to refuse to report for volunteer duty in protest.
In a Monday televised speech marking 17 years since the end of the Second Lebanon War, the head of the Iran-backed Shiite terror group Hassan Nasrallah claimed that Israel’s military has gradually “weakened” since the “defeat” it allegedly suffered in 2006 and warned that if conflict erupts, the Jewish state “will cease to exist.”
Jacob Magid contributed to this report.
