BEIRUT—With a sharply worded warning, Hezbollah Secretary-General Sheikh Naim Qassem cautioned the Lebanese authorities and Banque du Liban (BDL) against taking any step that would constrict Al-Qard Al-Hassan institute, describing it as nothing less than the “social lung” of a country whose state structures have all but collapsed. 

The Hezbollah’s alert did not come in a vacuum; it was a signal flare in a darkening landscape where financial, political, and military pressures are converging on a single objective: weakening the Resistance through means more silent than airstrikes, yet no less destructive.

The latest wave of financial and political pressure on Hezbollah coincides with Israeli media leaks hinting at the possibility of widening the warfront toward Lebanon, all while Washington pointedly ignores President Joseph Aoun’s initiative to restore the indirect negotiations.

The timing reveals a coordinated choreography: military escalation from one side, economic asphyxiation from the other, both working in tandem to open the northern front to war and the domestic arena to a slow, grinding financial siege.

Within this tightening vise, the recent circular issued by BDL demands that non-bank financial institutions gather detailed customer data for any transaction above one thousand dollars. 

While couched in the familiar language of “enhanced compliance,” the measure unmistakably extends beyond financial regulation into the realm of tracking liquidity flows within the Resistance’s social environment — particularly in a society that, after the banking sector’s collapse, has reverted to a cash-based economy.

On the anniversary of the martyrdom of media figure Mohammad Afif Al-Naboulsi and his comrades, Qassem’s message was unambiguous: do not allow international pressure to creep into domestic regulations in ways that suffocate the very communities that the state has abandoned. 

Qassem’s warning underscores Hezbollah’s conviction that economic pressure is simply one chapter in a broader political-security confrontation aimed at undermining the Resistance through non-military tools.

To understand the gravity of the latest circular, one must recall that it is not an isolated event but part of a legislative chain dating back to the early 2000s, driven primarily by Washington and the FATF. 

Lebanon was gradually inserted into an international compliance architecture under the banner of anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing — a framework marketed as reform, but in practice turned Lebanon from “participant” to “subordinate” within the global financial order.

The succession of laws — from Law 318 of 2001 to Laws 44, 42, and 55 in 2015 — and the expanding definitions of “financing” and “risk,” all reinforced by increasingly intrusive KYC requirements, built a system of permanent international surveillance over every customer, every institution, every economic sector. 

As the definition of “terrorist financing” ballooned to include indirect or even unintended support, any person or company could fall under suspicion based on nothing more than conjecture.

More troubling was Lebanon’s evolution from a merely compliant state to a full partner in global reporting networks, turning the Special Investigation Commission into a mandatory gateway through which all financial movement must pass.

In effect, the Lebanese economy became transparent not to its own citizens, but to external regulatory and intelligence structures capable of politicizing any activity connected to the Resistance’s support base.

This entire architecture, presented under the lofty slogan of “international transparency”, transformed Lebanon’s financial sector into a strategic pressure tool, especially after Hezbollah was incorporated into the HIFPA law in 2014 and its 2017 amendments, which broadened the scope of sanctions to include companies, professionals, and institutions affiliated with Hezbollah.

Lebanon’s inclusion in the CRS tax-information regime further opened its capital flows to external analysis, especially by Washington.

Today’s pressures are simply the natural extension of a 20-year trajectory designed to sever the Resistance from its social and financial lifelines by manufacturing “operational risks” for anyone who deals with it. 

But the American belief that financial warfare could choke Hezbollah collapsed after 2019, when the movement successfully shifted into a parallel cash-based economy. It built a functional and resilient financial ecosystem through liquidity networks, exchange channels, non-bank transfers, and internal redistribution systems.

The roughly one billion dollars collected over a few months came not from “shadow banks,” as some claimed, but from Hezbollah’s ability to convert cash into a stable socioeconomic framework inside its constituency.

This is where Al-Qard Al-Hassan stands as the most enduring financial institution in Lebanon’s new economy. It is not merely a charitable loan fund, but a full-fledged parallel economic model — immune to sanctions, cash-based, and capable of mobilizing an entire community around an alternative financial vision. 
Any attempt to undermine it is therefore interpreted — correctly — as a direct act of economic warfare!

Washington, meanwhile, has intensified its pressure by pushing the BDL to expand KYC enforcement to an unprecedented level, placing even minor transactions under scrutiny. This move is clearly part of an effort to suffocate the cash economy upon which the Resistance relies.

Yet Hezbollah, which has demonstrated adaptability on the battlefield, has translated that same flexibility into the realm of finance. Its turn toward diversified financial pathways — from gold, to crypto-assets, to regional donor networks, to local military manufacturing — signals that every financial chokehold will be met with an even more intricate financial workaround.

The economic war thus becomes a prolonged war of attrition: every American measure is countered by a new Resistance tactic, rendering “financial supremacy” far less decisive than Washington imagines.

The landscape today is marked by a dangerous escalation: Washington tightening the screws on Lebanon to enforce “full compliance,” dangling the threat of gray-listing, while Hezbollah raises its own ceiling, declaring that any assault on its financial networks is a red line no less serious than attempts to disarm it.

This is not a technical financial measure. It is an economic-political-strategic confrontation whose effects mirror those of military conflict. The most perilous scenario is a hybrid explosion — a fusion of financial collapse and military escalation — that could thrust Lebanon into an uncontrollable moment of national breakdown.

Yet experts point out that the Resistance retains a multilayered financial safety net combining regional support, a parallel economy, and domestic manufacturing. The tools of pressure are powerful — but the tools of survival are equally deep-rooted.