Hezbollah, the pro-Iranian Lebanese Shi'ite group founded…

Hezbollah, the pro-Iranian Lebanese Shi'ite group founded during the early 1980s, has long aspired to eliminate Israeli influence from the country.

Ehud Barak, in the face of determined resistance by Hezbollah militiamen, carries out his 1999 campaign promise to withdraw Israeli troops from Lebanon, even without an agreement with Syria, to a border demarcated by the UN.

Israel withdraws the last of its forces from southern Lebanon six weeks earlier than originally planned in the wake of the collapse of Israel's proxy militia, the South Lebanon Army.

Israel's eighteen-year-long occupation of southern Lebanon ends on May 24, when it withdraws the last of its troops from its self-declared security zone.