Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) abruptly ended his meeting with Gen. Rodolphe Haykal, the head of the Lebanese Armed Forces, on Thursday after Haykal declined to refer to Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.

Graham met with Haykal in his Senate office for a planned discussion on the latest military developments in Lebanon and the LAF’s approach to Israel and Hezbollah. The South Carolina senator wrote on X that he asked the Lebanese military official at the start of the meeting if he viewed Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, and did not appreciate the response he received. 

“I just had a very brief meeting with the Lebanese Chief of Defense General Rodolphe Haykal,” Graham said. “I asked him point blank if he believes Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. He said, ‘No, not in the context of Lebanon.’ With that, I ended the meeting.”

“They are clearly a terrorist organization. Hezbollah has American blood on its hands. Just ask the U.S. Marines. They have been designated as a foreign terrorist organization by both Republican and Democrat administrations since 1997 — for good reason,” he added. “As long as this attitude exists from the Lebanese Armed Forces, I don’t think we have a reliable partner in them. I am tired of the double speak in the Middle East. Too much is at stake.”

Haykal has been in Washington this week for meetings with U.S. lawmakers and Trump administration officials. Aside from Graham, Haykal met with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Reps. Brian Mast (R-FL) and Gregory Meeks (D-NY), respectively the chairman and ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, respectively. Haykal also met with Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine and officials at the CIA, the Pentagon and the National Security Council.

He was previously slated to visit the U.S. in November, but scrapped the trip after Graham and others canceled their meetings over a statement Haykal released weeks prior that blamed Israel for the unrest in Lebanon without mentioning Hezbollah. Graham, who has visited Lebanon multiple times in the last year to encourage the Lebanese government to disarm Hezbollah and stabilize its border with Israel, warned in numerous statements responding to Haykal at the time that his position toward U.S.-Lebanon relations would likely shift if changes were not made. 

“It is clear that the Lebanese Chief Head of Defense — because of a reference to Israel as the enemy and his weak almost non-existent effort to disarm Hezbollah — is a giant setback for efforts to move Lebanon forward,” Graham wrote on X in November. “This combination makes the Lebanese Armed Forces not a very good investment for America.”

“The idea of the Lebanese military joining forces with Hezbollah to combat Israel would put in jeopardy everything that I and many others are trying to do to help Lebanon move forward,” he cautioned in another tweet. 

The U.S., along with Graham, has been pushing Lebanon to follow through on its commitment to disarm Hezbollah, made as part of the Trump administration’s ceasefire deal between Israel and Hezbollah in 2024. The first phase of the deal, which went into effect in November of that year, called for the Lebanese military to remove Hezbollah from the territory south of the Litani River, near Israel’s border, by the end of 2025. The second phase would then focus on Hezbollah’s disarmament north of the Litani. 

The Lebanese government announced it accomplished that goal in early January, though Israel has disputed that claim, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office saying, “Efforts made toward this end by the Lebanese Government and the Lebanese Armed Forces are an encouraging beginning, but they are far from sufficient, as evidenced by Hezbollah’s efforts to rearm and rebuild its terror infrastructure with Iranian support.”

Graham said while in Israel in late December that the “trend lines in Lebanon” were “optimistic” following months of public statements from several senior Lebanese government officials calling for Hezbollah to be disarmed. 

“If you want peace, deal with the people who do not. Take them out of the game. Get your head out of the sand,” Graham said at a press conference in Tel Aviv. “If you want a peaceful Lebanon, you need to find a way to deal with Hezbollah because they don’t want peace with Israel. They want to destroy Israel. Most people in Lebanon don’t want to destroy Israel.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) announced on Tuesday that he had drafted legislation designating the Polisario Front, the militant group that claims sovereignty over parts of the Western Sahara, as a foreign terrorist organization and will formally introduce it “if there’s no change in their behavior.”

Cruz made the comments at a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee hearing focused on U.S. counterterrorism efforts in North Africa, after the hearing’s witnesses — the State Department’s Robert Palladino and Joel Borkert — both declined to agree with his statement that “the terrorist activity in the Sahel [region in Africa] is coming from the Polisario Front.”

“Iran is trying to turn the Polisario Front into the Houthis for West Africa, a proxy force capable of waging war to threaten regional stability and pressure U.S. partners whenever Iran wants leverage,” Cruz said. “The Polisario Front works with Iranian terrorist groups. It takes drones from the IRGC. It moves weapons and resources around the region, including to jihadists and much more.”

“I believe they should be designated as a terrorist group, and I’ve drafted a bill to do so if there’s no change in their behavior,” he added.

The Polisario Front is a separatist militant group founded in 1973 to fight against the Spanish occupation of parts of the Western Sahara. After Spain handed control of the territory to Mauritania and Morocco in 1975, splitting the land between the two countries, the PF waged war against both nations, hitting military and civilian targets while demanding recognition of Sahrawi ethnic group’s claims to the territory. The group declared in 1976 that all disputed territory in the region was part of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, and currently controls an area east of the Moroccan Wall. 

Mauritania, now an Islamic republic, fell to the PF and formally recognized the SADR in 1979. While Morocco and the PF agreed to a United Nations-brokered ceasefire in 1991 that remains in effect today, the PF’s increasingly close ties to Algeria, Nigeria and Iran while governing the disputed Saharan territory have become a source of concern to those opposed to Tehran’s growing influence in the region. 

President Donald Trump recognized Morocco’s claim to the Western Sahara in late 2020 at the conclusion of his first administration, as part of the deal brokered for Morocco to join the Abraham Accords. 

Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) introduced legislation designating the PF as a foreign terrorist organization last June. The House bill has been co-sponsored by Reps. Randy Fine (R-FL), Jimmy Panetta (D-CA), Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL), Jefferson Shreve (R-IN) and Lance Gooden (R-TX). 

Speaking on his “Verdict with Ted Cruz” podcast on Tuesday evening, the Texas senator described Africa as a “major front for radical Islamic terrorism” and said the continent serves as “a major battleground” pitting Russia and China against the United States. 

Regarding the PF, Cruz noted that, “The best way to understand it is as a Cold War relic, analogous to the Palestinian Liberation Front, the PLO, but it was in West Africa, and there’s still a degree to which that framework is accurate.”

“It is a darling of the international left and the United Nations, and the group has continued its insurgency against Morocco,” Cruz explained. “The critical dynamic is that Iran has begun pouring resources into the group. … The Iranians have been providing money and weapons and directions.”

Palladino, a senior bureau official with the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, said in his opening remarks to the committee that the Trump administration was looking “to North African countries to provide critical support to ensuring terrorist activity in the Sahel does not spread west to the Gulf of Guinea or north to regain a foothold in North Africa, where they represent a more immediate threat to the United States and our interests.”

After Cruz pressed him on if he was referring to the PF, Palladino did not answer directly, instead telling the Texas senator that “President Trump has made clear his desire to achieve a lasting resolution to the problem in the Western Sahara, to that dispute, and as part of that American policy currently, we are engaging all parties.”

Cruz went on to ask Palladino if he believed the PF posed a threat to U.S. interests, to which the NEA official replied, “We’re actively engaging all parties in the Western Sahara dispute in the interest of achieving a lasting and durable peace. That’s the policy of the president. We’re seeking more time to continue to find a way to find common ground and to come to an agreement to stabilize the situation and allow there to be prosperity to follow based upon stability.”

The Texas senator told Palladino that his answers were “positively Shakespearean. It was full of sound and fury and yet signifying nothing.”

Cruz then turned to Borkert, the deputy coordinator for programs and military coordination at the Bureau of Counterterrorism, who similarly declined to single out the PF by name. 

“We continue to monitor activities throughout North Africa,” Borkert said. “We continue to see the IRGC and Hezbollah, their activities in that region and globally, and as we look at these activities, we will work with our partner countries in order to counter those threats, and where possible, designate or encourage those countries to designate the IRGC, Hezbollah and those terrorist groups.”

Both men told Cruz that they were not instructed to exclude mentions of the PF in their testimony. Cruz later revealed he did not believe their claims.

“I believe both witnesses were instructed: Do not say a negative word about the Polisario Front,” Cruz said on his podcast that evening. “They were instructed to say nothing about the Polisario Front.”

“The administration is trying to negotiate a big peace deal in Africa. There are folks in the administration who are trying to negotiate a deal in Western Africa, and right now, one of the consequences of that is that they’re reluctant to call out the Polisario Front,” he explained. “I think the Polisario Front is really dangerous. They’re funded by Iran, and so I’m working to call out people who are enemies of America and to impose real costs and consequences on those jihadists that are enemies of America.”

President Donald Trump announced on Sunday that he plans to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization following months of bipartisan calls for his administration to target the group. 

Trump announced the move in an interview with journalist John Solomon of the conservative outlet Just the News on Sunday morning, saying that an executive order is being prepared for his signature. 

“It will be done in the strongest and most powerful terms,” Trump said. “Final documents are being drawn.”

The White House did not respond to Jewish Insider’s request for comment on the announcement or details of the order being drafted for the president. 

Trump considered designating the Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) during his first administration, though that effort never materialized. Sebastian Gorka, who serves as Trump’s deputy assistant for national security affairs and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council, has been publicly and privately urging the president to do so since returning to office, as have a chorus of GOP lawmakers, along with a handful of Democrats in Congress. 

Gorka posted on X on Sunday that the “time has come” to designate the group, which he called “the progenitor of all modern Jihadist terror groups, from al Qaeda to HAMAS.”

A Senate bill that would designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group, led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), has 11 co-sponsors, including Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA) and Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA). The House version of the bill has 19 co-sponsors, including four House Democrats.

Trump’s announcement comes less than a week after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, issued a declaration designating the Muslim Brotherhood and Council on American-Islamic Relations as foreign terrorist groups and transnational criminal organizations, a move prohibiting both groups from buying land in Texas and allowing the AG’s office to sue to shut them down.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in August that the FTO designation was “in the works” for the Brotherhood. 

“Obviously, there are different branches of the Muslim Brotherhood, so you’d have to designate each one of them,” Rubio told right-wing talk show host Sid Rosenberg on his radio program at the time, adding that the State Department needed to go through a lengthy “process which I didn’t fully appreciate until I came into this job.”

News of Trump’s comments was met with praise in the U.S. and in Israel, even as the details are still fuzzy over what he will be signing. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that he wanted to “commend President Trump on his decision to outlaw and designate the Muslim Brotherhood organization as a terrorist organization.”

“This is an organization that endangers stability throughout the Middle East and also beyond the Middle East. Therefore, the State of Israel has already outlawed part of the organization, and we are working to complete this action soon,” Netanyahu said. 

The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) released a statement commending “the fact that the threat posed by the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology is now being taken seriously at the highest levels of the U.S. government.”

“We welcome President Trump’s statements and the growing recognition that the Muslim Brotherhood, its ideology and network pose a serious challenge to the United States and democratic societies,” Charles Asher Small, ISGAP’s executive director, said to Jewish Insider.^. 

“A formal U.S. designation would represent an important first step to confront the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States,” Small added. “This will require sustained, evidence-based policy, serious scrutiny of its affiliated structures and funding streams, and long-term investment in democratic resilience.”

Dan Schlessinger, the lead attorney for the Boim family in their lawsuit against American Muslims for Palestine regarding the murder of American teenager David Boim in 1996, told JI in a statement: “This is welcome news for many including the Boim family. The next question is what does this mean for U.S.-based, Hamas adjacent groups like American Muslims for Palestine and Students for Justice in Palestine. Our hope is they will be included in this designation as well.”

Schlessinger and his team have accused AMP in court of acting as an “alter ego” of a now-defunct group that shut down after it was found to have provided support to Hamas.