The U.S.-designated Lebanon-based terrorist movement Hezbollah exploits children from its version of the scout movement to carry out jihadi missions that result in their deaths, according to a recent report on Lebanon’s MTV television network.
The Lebanese network’s report — translated by the Washington, D.C.-based Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) — comes amid U.S.-brokered peace talks between Israel and Beirut.
The report claims that Hezbollah gives child fighters heroes’ funerals and publicly glorifies them before their peers in order to encourage other children to follow in their footsteps. The MTV report said Hezbollah believes that every drop of bloodshed by child soldiers brings victory closer.
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It also claimed that Hezbollah uses its scout movements to cultivate an entire generation of obedient children prepared to die, through rhetoric that glorifies death and martyrdom. The MTV report, according to the MEMRI translation, said that "Hezbollah child soldiers have been used since the 1980s by this outlaw armed group. Not just as armed fighters but as Khomeini-loyal scouts."
The late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, reportedly exploited the use of Iranian children during the country’s 1980-1988 war against Iraq.
Matthew Levitt, a leading scholar on Hezbollah from the Washington Institute, said that "Hezbollah's recruitment and radicalization of youth through its Mahdi Scouts is long documented," other experts talking to Fox News Digital concurred.
"Hezbollah has boy scouts, and they have been taught jihad, and it is a well-known thing in Lebanon," Mideast expert Walid Phares told Fox News Digital.
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The Lebanon expert said they could be termed "children jihadists" who are preparing to become full Hezbollah fighters. Phares said they mostly assign them [the children of Hezbollah fighters] to spying and transporting ammunition. He argued if the scouts are getting funding from a ministry or national boy scouts association in Lebanon, they should be sanctioned if they have the evidence.
Multiple Fox News Digital Emails and phone calls to the World Organization of the Scouting Movement (WOSM) were not immediately returned. The U.S. branch of WOSM referred Fox News Digital to WOSM, which is in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
A Hezbollah expert from the Israel Alma Research and Education Center, Sarit Zehavi, called for action against the exploitation of children by the terror group.
"The only way to bring a change is to designate all of these allegedly civilian activities of Hezbollah and close the movement of its scouts, and enable the Shiites of Lebanon to have a different source of services, whether it is educational, formal or informal, which will be part of the Lebanese state, and not part of Hezbollah. The loyalty will be to the Lebanese state and not to Khomeini and the Islamic Republic."
She added, "This is only something Lebanon can do with a lot of international pressure, of course, led by the United States."
An Israeli diplomat, Tammy Rahamimoff-Honig, posted on X: "Hezbollah sacrifices Lebanese children to further the ambitions of the Iranian regime. This isn’t ‘resistance’. It’s child abuse."
Lebanon’s Ambassador to the U.S. declined to provide comment for this article.
