The United States has announced new sanctions against an alleged Hezbollah financing network, while highlighting the Lebanese group’s close ties to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, AFP reports.

Hezbollah’s legal designation as a “terrorist organisation” has been amended to note that it operates in “service to the Iranian regime under the command of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,” particularly the elite Quds Force, the Treasury Department said in a statement.

Washington designated Hezbollah as a “foreign terrorist organization” in 1997, and in 2001 updated its label to a “specially designated global terrorist” group.

The new redesignation “specifies that Hezbollah is an Iranian proxy, not a stand-alone operation as implied by the previous designation,” a State Department official said.

“This underscores that Hezbollah operates with little to no regard for Lebanese sovereignty, the Lebanese people, or the Lebanese state.”

The new sanctions target 10 people who are allegedly part of a network that transfers cash to Hezbollah, which has already been punished with US sanctions many times, the Treasury statement said.

“The network utilises couriers travelling on commercial airline flights between Lebanon, Turkiye, the UAE, and Iran to move up to hundreds of millions of dollars between jurisdictions, providing an avenue outside the formal financial system for Hezbollah to obtain foreign currency and evade sanctions,” the statement said.