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What Is Hezbollah? Even After Three Tries, the New York Times Is Stumped
The New York Times building in New York City. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
How many tries, by how many reporters, will it take the New York Times to explain accurately what Hezbollah is?
The newspaper has been fumbling and bumbling its way toward an answer in a way that illuminates some of the challenges the Times has faced in covering the wars of Iranian aggression.
Our story begins in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas. “What Is Hezbollah, the Group That Poses a Threat to Israel From the North?” a Times article published October 19, 2023, tried to explain. That article, by a Beirut-based British freelancer for the Times, Euan Ward, and a staff writer for the New York Times magazine, Nicholas Casey, did not use the word “terrorist” or describe the U.S. government’s designation of Hezbollah as a foreign terrorist organization. Instead the newspaper described the group as having “an expansive security apparatus and social services network.”
Then the Times Cairo bureau chief, Vivian Yee, took a fresh attempt at answering the question, for a piece published on September 17, 2024. That article appeared under the headline, “A Look at Hezbollah and What a Wider War Would Mean for Lebanon.” What a wider war would mean “for Lebanon” seems a somewhat narrow framework for analysis in a war with wide international consequences on everything from oil prices to the U.S.-Iran conflict and the American presidential elections. For our purposes, though, the Yee piece was a modest improvement over the October 2023 Times effort. This time around, at least, the Times acknowledged that Hezbollah is “considered a terrorist group by the United States and other countries.” It also noted that “many Lebanese see the group as an obstacle to progress that keeps threatening to drag the country into an unwanted war” and that the group uses “authoritarian tactics” to “quell any dissent.”
Perhaps concern about those “authoritarian tactics” help to explain why the Beirut-based Ward was reticent about using the term “terrorist.”
On September 18, 2024, the Times tried yet again, with a piece by an Israeli-born reporter fluent in Hebrew, Ephrat Livni. That one appeared under the “Jeopardy”-game-show-style headline “What Is Hezbollah, the Militant Group Based in Lebanon?” Livni’s article calls the group an “Iran-backed militia — which the United States designated as a foreign terrorist organization decades ago.” The “decades ago” makes it sound like Hezbollah’s terrorism is a thing of the past rather than an ongoing problem. Later, the Times offers some more detail: “Hezbollah was involved in the suicide bombing of the American embassy in Beirut in 1983, drawing the enmity of the United States. The United States designated Hezbollah as a terrorist organization in 1997, and has long sanctioned people and companies with ties to the group to try to cut off its funding.”
Livni’s piece also credits Neil MacFarquhar and Ben Hubbard as having “contributed reporting,” bringing to a whopping six the grand total of Times journalists— Ward, Casey, Yee, Livni, MacFarquhar, Hubbard—mustered into action to attempt to answer the “What is Hezbollah?” puzzler.
Even on the third try, even after having rustled up a half dozen bodies to tackle the issue, the Times can’t quite seem to get a grip on the facts of the situation.
Neither Yee’s article nor Livni’s for example, make any mention of Hezbollah having killed a dozen Druze, mostly children, in July 2024 in an attack on a soccer field in Majdal Shams in Northern Israel.
Livni’s article, after a subhead asking “Why are Hezbollah and Israel fighting now?” reports, “Hezbollah’s military wing has been targeting northern Israel for nearly a year in solidarity with Hamas and its war with Israel in Gaza.” Yet the Hamas war with Israel hasn’t been only “in Gaza” but included rocket attacks and deadly raids into Israel. The same article describes Hezbollah as having been “formed in the 1980s from the chaos of Lebanon’s long civil war to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in 2000.” The Lebanon civil war began not to fight the Israeli occupation but the rather Palestinian domination. The Council on Foreign Relations explains, “Hezbollah emerged during Lebanon’s civil war, which broke out in 1975 when long-simmering discontent over the large, armed Palestinian presence in the country reached a boiling point.” The Times, because of its anti-Israel tilt, can’t bring itself to talk about armed Palestinians in Lebanon. Instead it has to frame everything as a response to Israeli “occupation,” even if that’s inaccurate.
The idea that Hezbollah is mainly a response to “the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon” or to the Hamas “war with Israel in Gaza” is a misunderstanding. Like revolutionary Iran, Hezbollah has a goal of imposing its version of militant Islam worldwide and wiping Israel off the map. Its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has stated that if Jews “all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them world-wide.”
Maybe by the fourth or fifth or sixth try, the Times might work its way up to including that Nasrallah quotation in its explanation to its readers of what Hezbollah is. Maybe the seventh or eighth or ninth Times reporter assigned to the job will figure it out. Until then, readers will be better off looking elsewhere, to more trustworthy sources than the Times, for an explanation of the terrorist organization and its goals.
Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.
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Iranian Media Claims Obtaining ‘Sensitive’ Israeli Intelligence Materials
FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
i24 News – Iranian and Iran-affiliated media claimed on Saturday that the Islamic Republic had obtained a trove of “strategic and sensitive” Israeli intelligence materials related to Israel’s nuclear facilities and defense plans.
“Iran’s intelligence apparatus has obtained a vast quantity of strategic and sensitive information and documents belonging to the Zionist regime,” Iran’s state broadcaster said, referring to Israel in the manner accepted in those Muslim or Arab states that don’t recognize its legitimacy. The statement was also relayed by the Lebanese site Al-Mayadeen, affiliated with the Iran-backed jihadists of Hezbollah.
The reports did not include any details on the documents or how Iran had obtained them.
The intelligence reportedly included “thousands of documents related to that regime’s nuclear plans and facilities,” it added.
According to the reports, “the data haul was extracted during a covert operation and included a vast volume of materials including documents, images, and videos.”
The report comes amid high tensions over Iran’s nuclear program, over which it is in talks with the US administration of President Donald Trump.
Iranian-Israeli tensions reached an all-time high since the October 7 massacre and the subsequent Gaza war, including Iranian rocket fire on Israel and Israeli aerial raids in Iran that devastated much of the regime’s air defenses.
Israel, which regards the prospect of the antisemitic mullah regime obtaining a nuclear weapon as an existential threat, has indicated it could resort to a military strike against Iran’s installations should talks fail to curb uranium enrichment.
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Israel Retrieves Body of Thai Hostage from Gaza
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz looks on, amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, in Jerusalem, Nov. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
The Israeli military has retrieved the body of a Thai hostage who had been held in Gaza since Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack, Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Saturday.
Nattapong Pinta’s body was held by a Palestinian terrorist group called the Mujahedeen Brigades, and was recovered from the area of Rafah in southern Gaza, Katz said. His family in Thailand has been notified.
Pinta, an agricultural worker, was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz, a small Israeli community near the Gaza border where a quarter of the population was killed or taken hostage during the Hamas attack that triggered the devastating war in Gaza.
Israel’s military said Pinta had been abducted alive and killed by his captors, who had also killed and taken to Gaza the bodies of two more Israeli-American hostages that were retrieved earlier this week.
There was no immediate comment from the Mujahedeen Brigades, who have previously denied killing their captives, or from Hamas. The Israeli military said the Brigades were still holding the body of another foreign national. Only 20 of the 55 remaining hostages are believed to still be alive.
The Mujahedeen Brigades also held and killed Israeli hostage Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, according to Israeli authorities. Their bodies were returned during a two-month ceasefire, which collapsed in March after the two sides could not agree on terms for extending it to a second phase.
Israel has since expanded its offensive across the Gaza Strip as US, Qatari and Egyptian-led efforts to secure another ceasefire have faltered.
US-BACKED AID GROUP HALTS DISTRIBUTIONS
The United Nations has warned that most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population is at risk of famine after an 11-week Israeli blockade of the enclave, with the rate of young children suffering from acute malnutrition nearly tripling.
Aid distribution was halted on Friday after the US-and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said overcrowding had made it unsafe to continue operations. It was unclear whether aid had resumed on Saturday.
The GHF began distributing food packages in Gaza at the end of May, overseeing a new model of aid distribution which the United Nations says is neither impartial nor neutral. It says it has provided around 9 million meals so far.
The Israeli military said on Saturday that 350 trucks of humanitarian aid belonging to U.N. and other international relief groups were transferred this week via the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza.
The war erupted after Hamas-led terrorists took 251 hostages and killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, in the October 7, 2023 attack, Israel’s single deadliest day.
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US Mulls Giving Millions to Controversial Gaza Aid Foundation, Sources Say
Palestinians carry aid supplies which they received from the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, in the central Gaza Strip, May 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed/File Photo
The State Department is weighing giving $500 million to the new foundation providing aid to war-shattered Gaza, according to two knowledgeable sources and two former US officials, a move that would involve the US more deeply in a controversial aid effort that has been beset by violence and chaos.
The sources and former US officials, all of whom requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that money for Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) would come from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which is being folded into the US State Department.
The plan has met resistance from some US officials concerned with the deadly shootings of Palestinians near aid distribution sites and the competence of the GHF, the two sources said.
The GHF, which has been fiercely criticized by humanitarian organizations, including the United Nations, for an alleged lack of neutrality, began distributing aid last week amid warnings that most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population is at risk of famine after an 11-week Israeli aid blockade, which was lifted on May 19 when limited deliveries were allowed to resume.
The foundation has seen senior personnel quit and had to pause handouts twice this week after crowds overwhelmed its distribution hubs.
The State Department and GHF did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Reuters has been unable to establish who is currently funding the GHF operations, which began in Gaza last week. The GHF uses private US security and logistics companies to transport aid into Gaza for distribution at so-called secure distribution sites.
On Thursday, Reuters reported that a Chicago-based private equity firm, McNally Capital, has an “economic interest” in the for-profit US contractor overseeing the logistics and security of GHF’s aid distribution hubs in the enclave.
While US President Donald Trump’s administration and Israel say they don’t finance the GHF operation, both have been pressing the United Nations and international aid groups to work with it.
The US and Israel argue that aid distributed by a long-established U.N. aid network was diverted to Hamas. Hamas has denied that.
USAID has been all but dismantled. Some 80 percent of its programs have been canceled and its staff face termination as part of President Donald Trump’s drive to align US foreign policy with his “America First” agenda.
One source with knowledge of the matter and one former senior official said the proposal to give the $500 million to GHF has been championed by acting deputy USAID Administrator Ken Jackson, who has helped oversee the agency’s dismemberment.
The source said that Israel requested the funds to underwrite GHF’s operations for 180 days.
The Israeli government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The two sources said that some US officials have concerns with the plan because of the overcrowding that has affected the aid distribution hubs run by GHF’s contractor, and violence nearby.
Those officials also want well-established non-governmental organizations experienced in running aid operations in Gaza and elsewhere to be involved in the operation if the State Department approves the funds for GHF, a position that Israel likely will oppose, the sources said.
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