{"id":7595,"date":"2017-06-09T06:23:51","date_gmt":"2017-06-09T11:23:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/?p=7595"},"modified":"2017-06-09T06:23:51","modified_gmt":"2017-06-09T11:23:51","slug":"ed-royce-hezbollahs-activities-since-the-nuclear-agreement-have-expanded-in-scope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/7595\/","title":{"rendered":"Ed Royce: Hezbollah\u2019s activities since the nuclear agreement have \u2018expanded in scope.\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce said Hezbollah continues to be Iran\u2019s front line<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Washington, D.C., Jun 2017\u00a0\u2013<\/strong> Below is part of House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce opening statement at the hearing entitled \u201cAttacking Hezbollah\u2019s Financial Network: Policy Options\u201d on 8 Jun 2017:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Hezbollah is a terrorist group based in Lebanon, where it is a significant political force. Its history dates to 1982, when members of Tehran\u2019s Revolutionary Guards Corps\u2019 Quds Force, deployed to Lebanon\u2019s Bekaa Valley, created, armed, and funded a small force which became Hezbollah.
\nToday, as a leading Iranian proxy, Hezbollah continues to be Iran\u2019s front line against Israel. Since its 2006 war with Israel, Hezbollah has dramatically grown its supply of rockets and missiles, allowing it to strike throughout Israel with much greater precision and force.
\nI was in Haifa, Israel in 2006, when 10,000 Hezbollah rockets rained down.\u00a0 Eleven years later, the group maintains an arsenal of some 110,000 rockets of increasing sophistication.\u00a0 One observer even wrote that Hezbollah is \u2018now more militarily powerful than most North Atlantic Treaty Organization members.\u2019
\nAnd it is putting that military power to effective use. In Syria, its fighters are key to Tehran and Moscow\u2019s efforts to prop up the Assad regime along with Russian troops and Iran\u2019s Revolutionary Guards.
\nFor 30 years, Hezbollah has remained Iran\u2019s proxy, and Iran remains Hezbollah\u2019s primary source of financial support. In April 2015, its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, boasted that even under sanctions, Iran still funded Hezbollah\u2019s terror.\u00a0 He anticipated that a \u2018rich and powerful Iran, which will be open to the world\u2019 would be able to do even more. The Iran nuclear agreement has made it possible for Iran to provide Hezbollah with a windfall.
\nHezbollah\u2019s activities since the nuclear agreement have \u2018expanded in scope.\u2019
\nBut Tehran is not Hezbollah\u2019s only source of income. Since its inception, Hezbollah has developed a broad criminal network involved in a range of illegal activities \u2013 from drug trafficking to cigarette smuggling to money laundering to counterfeiting. These global terrorists double as global criminals.
\nIndeed, in February 2016, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration \u2013 in an operation led by one witness here today \u2013 implicated Hezbollah in a multi-million-dollar drug trafficking and money laundering network that spanned four continents and put cocaine on the streets of the United States.
\nThe Committee is focused on the best way to attack Hezbollah\u2019s financial network and its tentacles across the globe. In 2015, we led the way to enact the Hezbollah International Financing Prevention Act to target those that facilitate financial transactions for Hezbollah. This has helped put Hezbollah in the \u2018worst financial shape in decades,\u2019 according to a former top Treasury official, despite Iran\u2019s continued support.\u00a0 Part II of this legislation is coming.\u00a0 But unfortunately that\u2019s of little comfort to Israelis staring down an arsenal of rockets that sit just across the border in Lebanon, or the Syrians being slaughtered at the hands of these terrorists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Washington, D.C., Jun 2017\u00a0\u2013 Below is part of House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce opening statement at the hearing entitled \u201cAttacking Hezbollah\u2019s Financial Network: […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7596,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","category-terrorism-fundamentalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7595"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7597,"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7595\/revisions\/7597"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irandemocratic.org\/public_html\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}