When we founded CENTEF, our goal was to analyze terror organizations through a financial lens, using a technological drive, the way you would any other business. Naturally, these groups aren’t keen to share their finances. They understand that revealing their financial reports would expose their pain points, which the counter-terror financing community would quickly turn into choke points.
While kinetic operations destroy stock, financial operations destroy the ability to replace it or even better – the ability to procure it in the first place. And another example, consider two kinetic operations that can eliminate the same amount of terrorists and infrastructure, yet one costs Hezbollah $100 million to recover from while the other costs $800 million. A defense minister would definitely want this data presented before making a decision.
Because Hezbollah’s financial reports were nowhere to be found, we set out to research and build them ourselves.
There are many estimates of Hezbollah’s overall annual budget. Most rely on guesswork, some on fragmented data, and all of them look exclusively at the revenue side. But the beauty of financial reports is that they are a closed system that must ultimately balance. So we asked a simple question: why not analyze Hezbollah from the expense side? And that is exactly what we set out to do. We assembled a team of experts from diverse fields and dove deep into the challenge.
We invite you to follow our publications as the project progresses, and make your own assumptions about Hezbollah’s finances. Our interactive tool, which can be found here, allows you to create a budget for Hezbollah based on budget categories that we’re studying. You can even break down the budget between cash expenditures that Hezbollah itself is on the hook for, and Iranian in-kind transfers, which are non-cash items Iran supplies to Hezbollah directly, such as weapons.
The first reports we are publishing today, covers weapons and munitions procurement, as well as media expenditure, for fiscal year 2024: from Katyusha rockets and Kornet launchers and missiles, to cameras, social media operations, and reporters.
Other topics our researchers will publish on in the near future include Hezbollah’s payments to wounded fighters and spending on its military infrastructure.
Join us as we embark on this project. Please explore our interactive tool.
