Israeli Envoy to South Korea: Hamas Used North Korean Weapons to Attack Israel

Israeli Ambassador to South Korea Akiva Tor said Saturday that Hamas terrorists have North Korean weapons in their huge hidden stockpiles.

Tor implied these weapons have been used to attack Israel during the current conflict, which began with the savage Hamas slaughter of Israeli civilians on October 7.

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“In Gaza, as it is the one which attacks us, they use North Korean weapons. It could be that these North Korean weapons have been in Iran for quite a long time,” Ambassador Tor told Voice of America News (VOA).

“We will destroy these weapons in Gaza,” he vowed.

VOA quoted former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) officer Bruce Bechtol to support Tor’s claim. Bechtol, now a political science professor at Texas’s Angelo University, said photos of rockets and machine guns captured from Hamas by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) included weapons that appeared North Korean in origin.

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Radio Free Asia (RFA) quoted Bechtol explaining that “the Syrians deal with Hezbollah a lot and Hezbollah deals with Hamas a lot,” creating a pipeline for North Korean arms to reach Gaza.

“A lot of the trade that North Korea does with both Hamas and Hezbollah is deals that they make through the IRGC, the Iranian Republican Guard Corps,” he said. 

IRGC actually stands for “Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,” the theoretically controlled elite wing of the Iranian military. The IRGC is itself a designated foreign terrorist organization.

Bechtol suspects the IDF will find more North Korean munitions after it launches a ground offensive into Gaza and cleans out more of the terrorist group’s weapon caches.

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On Tuesday, a senior South Korean defense official also accused North Korea of supplying weapons to Hamas and said Pyongyang could be providing the terrorists with training and tactical support as well.

“Hamas is believed to be directly or indirectly linked to North Korea in various areas, such as the weapons trade, tactical guidance, and training. There is a possibility that North Korea could use Hamas’ attack methods for a surprise invasion of South Korea,” the official with South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) told UPI. 

According to the JCS source, Hamas likely obtained F-7 rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) launchers, 122mm rocket launchers, and artillery shells from Pyongyang. Artillery shells recovered by the IDF along the Gaza border have been stamped with the same “Bang-122” designation used by North Korean artillery rounds.

As for tactics, the South Korean official noted that Hamas uses the same “asymmetric attack pattern” that Seoul anticipates from North Korea if hostilities ever resume, including the same first-strike tactic of overwhelming more sophisticated defenses with huge swarms of cheap, low-accuracy rockets and drones.

North Korean troops have been seen practicing the exact same paraglider infiltration tactic used by the Hamas death squads in the initial attack on Israeli civilians. In December 2016, dictator Kim Jong-un personally oversaw a training session in which paraglider troops practiced assaulting the Blue House, the South Korean presidential estate.

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The South Korean Defense Ministry seconded these allegations when reporters asked for comment. South Korean analysts are reportedly studying the difficulties experienced by Israel in countering the Hamas surprise attack and adapting their own defenses to cope with similar tactics from North Korea.

North Korean state media on Friday strenuously denied the “groundless and false” accusations that Hamas is using North Korean weapons, calling it a “sinister” plot by the United States to smear the regime in Pyongyang.

“The U.S. administration’s reptile press bodies and quasi-experts are spreading a groundless and false rumor that ‘North Korea’s weapons’ seemed to be used for the attack on Israel,” railed Ri Kwang-song, a commentator for the dictatorship’s KCNA news agency.

“They are also building up public opinion that the DPRK will make free use of the ‘strategy for blackmail diplomacy’ escalating the regional tension by taking advantage of the U.S. great interest in the Middle East and Ukraine,” Ri wrote. DPRK is the North Korean regime’s preferred name for itself, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Ri said Israeli Ambassador Tor’s remarks were “a bid to shift the blame for the Middle East crisis caused by its wrong hegemonic policy onto a third country and thus evade the international criticism focused on the empire of evil.”

North Korean media on Tuesday additionally blamed Israel for the conflict with Hamas and accused the Israelis of perpetrating “constant criminal acts” against the Palestinians.

Ambassador Tor, who has been Israel’s representative to South Korea since 2022, on Tuesday thanked South Korea for its steadfast support after the Hamas attack.

“I would like to thank the Republic of Korea government for its strong statements of condemnation of the Hamas atrocities and for being a friend to Israel,” Tor said at a pro-Israel rally in Seoul. He commended the hundreds of Koreans, Jews, and Israelis at the rally for “not giving in to fear or anxiety.”

Tor vowed the “terror organization” Hamas will “not retain the ability to harm Israel at the end of this struggle.” He said the people of Gaza are “not the enemy of Israel,” but the depravity of Hamas must be ended.

“Blinded and obsessed by anger, Hamas is committing a massacre, and we must stop this atrocity,” he said.

“There is no justification for terrorism; there is no excuse. Israel has the right and duty to defend itself against the brutal attack of Hamas and to make sure this never happens again,” added Joy Sakurai, deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul.

Rally participants concluded the event by chanting, “Return the hostages, surrender immediately, we support peace in Israel.”

There were two pro-Palestinian demonstrations of roughly comparable size in Seoul earlier in the week. At one of them, the demonstrators chanted, “Palestine resistance against Israel is just.”

The Korea Herald reported that a press briefing was scheduled by the Korea-Israel Friendship Association on Friday, but it was “canceled due to safety concerns.” The association went on to co-sponsor the rally on Tuesday.