Matthew Levitt

Matthew Levitt is an American counterterrorism analyst whose work maps the organisations, companies, charities and financial channels associated with Hezbollah and Hamas. As at 29 July 2026, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy identified him as the Fromer-Wexler Senior Fellow and director of its Reinhard Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence. Its biography also records earlier service at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and as a deputy assistant secretary at the United States Treasury from 2005 to early 2007.

Contribution

Levitt's Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon's Party of God assembled designation notices, indictments, court records and investigations into a network account of Hezbollah's overseas activity. Georgetown University Press issued an updated edition in November 2024. The publisher record establishes the edition and scope. It does not establish that the book is the field's standard account or that every proposition in it has been independently adjudicated.

The method matters for economic statecraft because financial restrictions require target development: officials must distinguish an organisation from its officers, facilitators, accounts and commercial fronts. Levitt's work offers practitioner-informed analysis of that problem. Government actions against Al-Qard Al-Hassan, however, must be sourced to the relevant Treasury notices rather than to Levitt. Treasury's 2025 and 2026 releases are administrative determinations and remain attributed to the United States government. Levitt's analysis can supply interpretation and context, not the legal status or truth of each designation rationale.

This distinction also protects the evidentiary chain. A designation notice shows what an authority decided and alleged; a court record shows its own procedural result; scholarship can connect patterns across records. None should silently substitute for another.

See also

Hezbollah | Al-Qard Al-Hassan | Terrorist-financing designation (SDGT) | Juan C. Zarate

Sources

• Washington Institute for Near East Policy, "Matthew Levitt", accessed 29 July 2026.
• Matthew Levitt, *Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon's Party of God*, updated edition (Georgetown University Press, 2024).
• United States Department of the Treasury, action against AQAH officials and an associated entity, 3 July 2025.
• United States Department of the Treasury, action against Jood SARL, 10 February 2026.