It is classified as a terrorist organisation by the majority of the international community. By legal definition, all Hezbollah members are terrorists regardless of what they do in the organisation, in the same way that all SS members are war criminals even if they were an office janitor or something, which makes them legitimate targets in a broader way than ordinary combatants who are bound and covered by the laws of war.
I don’t know if you grew up during the color coded terror threat level days, but after updating everyone on the days terrorism threat color, the nightly news anchors would share how many terrorists were killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Even as a kid, I thought to myself, “how is everyone killed by coalition forces a terrorist?”
Or, “why are car bombs that kill coalition forces in theatre, called terror attacks?”
News flash, governments and media label all sorts of organizations and actions terrorism, 90% of it is propaganda, or bullshit.
Otherwise, I guess that would mean Ukrainian forces fighting Russians are also terrorists, which is how the Russian government and media refers to them.
in the same way that all SS members are war criminals
That’s absolutely not how the nazis’ war crimes were handled post-war.
Only those with a direct active role and sufficient knowledge were charged in the post-war trials.
90+% of the SS members just went right back into their pre-war jobs.
(At least in the western part, the Soviets were much more…thorough in their de-nazification.)
Also, a janitor in a civilian building will never be an active combatant by any stretch of international law, no matter which organisation they belong to.
In law, every SS member, without exception, was axiomatically classified as a war criminal, with membership being sufficient evidence in itself. Of course, the western allies were not above looking the other way if it potentially meant the difference between victory and defeat in the Cold War, but this was an informal policy imposed from high up.
