New Zealand designates Houthis as terror organization

New Zealand designated the entirety of Hezbollah as a terrorist entity on Wednesday, in an adjustment to its 2010 decision to list just the military wing.

The decision was made following advice from New Zealand police that cited decades of terrorist activity, most recently the arrest of two Hezbollah-affiliated people who were allegedly planning an attack on a Jewish community in Brazil.

Israel has been engaged in a ground offensive in southern Lebanon since early October after it escalated operations against Hezbollah in response to nearly a year of daily rocket and drone attacks targeting northern Israel following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.

Wellington also listed Yemen’s Houthi rebels as a terrorist group.

According to local reports, the designation came after police advised that the Houthis’ consistent attacks on ships in the Red Sea in the past year constituted terrorist activity.

The Houthis have said they are targeting Israel- and US-related ships in support of Gaza amid the ongoing Hamas-Israel war in the Palestinian enclave.

New Zealand is the 30th country to list the entire Hezbollah organization as a terrorist entity.

“It’s very simple. For any organization to be deemed a terrorist organization under New Zealand legislation, we have to have evidence, and we go through a number of tests under our legislation, that the organization has knowingly undertaken terrorist activity,” New Zealand’s Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said about the designations, adding that this was determined to be the case for Hezbollah and the Houthis.

New Zealand’s decision makes it a criminal offense to carry out property or financial transactions with Hezbollah or the Houthis or provide them with material support. It also freezes any of the organizations’ assets in New Zealand.

Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar welcomed the decision in a post on X.

“I congratulate the government of New Zealand on its decision today to designate Hezbollah and the Houthis (Ansar Allah) as terrorist organizations,” he wrote.

In February, New Zealand designated the entirety of Hamas as a terrorist organization, with only the group’s military wing classified as such since 2010.

The decision to expand the designation came as a result of Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel in which terrorists murdered some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 hostages, sparking the war in Gaza.

New Zealand said in February that it held the whole of Hamas responsible for the attack, necessitating the expansion of its designation.