Israeli media outlets are reporting statements by Israeli Home Front Command Minister Avi Dichter calling on the European Union to formally blacklist Hezbollah as a terror organization. Speaking to lawmakers in France – where fears of Hezbollah retaliation have driven officials to resist E.U. designation of the Iran-backed group – Dichter insisted that “Saying Hezbollah is not a terror organization is like saying Paris does not belong in France,” and that “talking about [Hezbollah leader] Nasrallah as a political figure is like talking about bin Laden as a political figure.”

Pressure has been mounting on countries such as France to drop their objections, and for the E.U. to blacklist Hezbollah. Bulgarian officials recently linked Hezbollah members to the July 2012 bus bombing in Bulgaria, an E.U. country, that killed five Israeli and one Bulgarian civilian, the latter being an E.U. citizen. Yesterday a defendant on trial for terror-related charges in Cyprus, an E.U. country, confessed to being a Hezbollah member.

Foreign policy analysts increasingly see only one conclusion to the E.U. debate:

[Hezbollah] Secretary-General, Hassan Nasrallah, has warned that a European ban would ‘destroy’ the group because ‘the sources of our funding will dry up and the sources of moral, political and material support will be destroyed’. Only the Netherlands has argued against the present consensus in Europe. With direct evidence of Hezbollah now claiming civilian lives in an EU member state, calls to ban the group must surely prove unstoppable.

[Photo: Oren Lavi / Wiki Commons]