Hezbollah is infamous for building a vast military arsenal and financial network. But right now it is the group’s schools that are inspiring particular controversy, both inside Lebanon and beyond. These institutions, which are supposed to be educational, are drawing renewed scrutiny for enforcing ideological loyalty, deepening sectarian identity, and normalizing a culture of violence and hatred among the young.
U.S. Republican Party member Tom Harb called on the Lebanese government to close what he described as “Hezbollah’s schools of enmity and vengeance” following a large event organized by the Mahdi Scouts Association on October 12 at Beirut’s Sports City.
Harb argued that the scenes from the celebration expose the dangerous state of education within Hezbollah’s circles, urging Lebanese authorities to redirect students toward schools that focus on technology, entrepreneurship, and productive skills.
His remarks have reignited broader questions about the impact of ideological education and how it shapes Lebanon’s national identity, especially at a time when the country faces a deep economic and social crisis threatening the future of its next generation.
“The most dangerous thing Hezbollah is doing today,” says Mustafa Amin, a Lebanese expert on extremist groups, “is indoctrinating generations through its educational and scouting system, instilling in schools, youth activities, and unofficial curricula values that go beyond the boundaries of the Lebanese state, creating a transnational project built on glorifying the Iranian model.”
Amin describes the intellectual environment the group cultivates as “a closed ideological bubble that excludes dissent and treats any deviation as betrayal. This bubble produces a generation cut off from the concept of the nation, seeing the state not as a reference, but as an adversary. And that,” he warns, “leads to the disintegration of society and the weakening of the state.”
In 2023, Hezbollah’s former Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah announced during the anniversary of the Al-Mahdi Schools that the party would continue “expanding and developing these schools horizontally, vertically, and geographically, as they are deeply tied to our faith and jihadist mission.”
Yet, obituaries published by Hezbollah itself reveal the group’s recruitment of minors and their deployment to battlefields. During the Syrian war, several such cases emerged — among them, the 2017 death of Mahdi Hassan Abu Hamdan, a minor whose passing was followed, ironically, the next day by an announcement of his high school graduation, as reported by local media.
A 2016 video from one of Hezbollah’s schools showed children in military uniforms carrying toy guns and performing a mock attack on an Israeli position — a chilling illustration of early indoctrination through militarized play.
Political Lebanese analyst Makram Rabah stresses that “the core issue is preventing Hezbollah from presenting its institutions as ordinary schools when in reality they are mobilizing children to serve a suicidal project that has nothing to do with Lebanon.”
He adds in his interview with Alhurra that “schools and scouting movements should nurture loyalty to the nation and family, not to militias or ideological causes.”
The Al-Mahdi Scouts Association represents the second stage of indoctrination for children within Hezbollah’s ecosystem. Founded in 1985 and officially licensed in 1992, the association now counts roughly 75,000 members across Lebanon — in Beirut, Mount Lebanon, the South, the Bekaa, and the North, according to its official website.
According to a June 2022 report by the Alma Research Center in Israel, the activities of Hezbollah’s Al-Mahdi Scouts Association go far beyond traditional scouting — effectively serving as a platform for early recruitment into the party’s ranks.
Children as young as five years old join the scouts, where they undergo intensive religious and ideological training that intensifies as they grow older. The report notes that “many adolescents between the ages of 16 and 17 transition directly into Hezbollah’s military programs.”
Hezbollah’s Al-Imam al-Mahdi and Al-Mustafa school networks are the group’s most prominent educational arms, and the party makes no secret of their role as pillars of its ideological project.
In 2022, a video went viral showing children from Hezbollah-affiliated schools chanting the Arabic version of the Iranian song “Peace to You, O Mahdi,” a performance that sparked widespread outrage across Lebanon. The song invokes Imam Mahdi, the awaited savior in Shiʿi Islam.
The group also produces a series of publications targeting children. One of them, Mahdi magazine, launched in 2003, caters to readers aged 4 to 17. It serves as a “soft tool” of indoctrination, using colorful stories and imagery to normalize the concepts of “jihad” and armed struggle.
Again, this contradicts the claim higher up that the schools began doing this only “in recent years”
These practices violate the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by Lebanon in 1991, which protects minors from violence and exploitation.
Lebanese legal expert Amin Bashir explains that “any religious or educational activity that incites hatred or fuels sectarianism constitutes a violation of Article 9 of the Lebanese Constitution.” He adds:
“Hezbollah’s school curricula and scouting programs contradict the spirit of this article. They promote ideological mobilization and hatred — a constitutional breach and potentially a criminal act, as they glorify a foreign state and serve Iranian interests. This could expose Lebanon to international sanctions and political or economic isolation.”
However, a source within Lebanon’s Parliamentary Education Committee told Alhurra that “most schools in Lebanon are built on religious or sectarian foundations, so shutting down schools linked to a religious affiliation would effectively mean closing most schools in the country.”
The source denied that there is any political pressure to close Hezbollah’s schools.
Lebanon’s education system, the report concludes, mirrors the country’s deeply sectarian social structure, where most schools , whether Catholic, Evangelical, Orthodox, Amal-affiliated, or Sunni Islamic institutions— are organized along confessional lines rather than national ones.
For his part, Makram Rabah stresses “the need to subject Hezbollah’s institutions to proper oversight, just as the law requires for all entities affiliated with religious organizations.”
He adds that the law allows the government to monitor these institutions to ensure they are not exploited for purposes that undermine the sovereignty of the state — yet Hezbollah, he notes, runs its institutions as independent republics operating outside the authority of the Lebanese state.
