South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) warned lawmakers in the country that it has reason to believe communist North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un is preparing to escalate Pyongyang’s involvement in the ongoing conflict between Israel and the genocidal jihadist terror group Hamas, ordering “comprehensive” support for the terrorists.
North Korea has a long history of backing anti-Israel groups and jihadist terrorists in the region. Hamas conspicuously thanked the North Korean regime in 2017 for supporting “the Palestinians’ struggle” and defended Pyongyang against alleged “Israeli abuse.”
Following the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel – a sweeping siege of residential communities in which jihadists massacred entire families in their homes, tortured and abducted victims, and filmed themselves desecrating their remains – multiple reports surfaced suggesting that the terrorists may have used North Korean weapons in their assault. The Israeli government said in October that it had discovered North Korean weapons in Hamas possession, suggesting the weapons were either sold directly to Hamas or given to the terrorists through North Korean ally Iran, the world’s top state sponsor of terrorism.
A masked militant from Hamas stands behind a machine gun on a truck on Wednesday, Aug. 25, 2021 (AP Photo/Adel Hana).
In the aftermath of the October 7 siege, North Korea blamed Israel for Hamas’s gruesome slaughter of infants, the disabled, and the elderly in the country but denied any involvement or support for the attack.
This young woman’s grandmother was murdered by Hamas terrorists. She found out from Facebook after Hamas posted a video of the execution (@Israel Twitter/X).
Speaking on Wednesday to members of South Korea’s National Assembly — the federal legislature — officials from Seoul’s NIS said that Kim was preparing to expand its backing for Hamas, ordering his top officials to issue “comprehensive support for Palestine [sic]” in response to Israel’s ongoing counterterrorism operation against Hamas. The South Korean newspaper Korea JoongAng Daily, citing a lawmaker present at the closed-door NIS briefing, said the intelligence officials believed that Kim saw an opportunity to “fully exploit” the conflict and support North Korea’s Hamas allies.
“According to the lawmaker, the NIS noted that North Korea has a history of exporting anti-tank weapons and multi-launch rocket launchers to armed groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon,” JoongAng added.
NIS reportedly claimed that Hamas already possessed a significant stockpile of North Korean weapons and had engaged in tactics, including sending terrorists over the tall border fence between Gaza and Israel via paragliding, consistent with “North Korean training.”
The NIS report was part of a broader national security audit presented to the National Assembly on Wednesday. While North Korea denies selling weapons to Hamas, it openly displays its military arsenals and boasts of its arms trade. In July, for example, Kim Jong-un personally gave Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu a tour of a “weapons exhibition” featuring intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and other top military products, an event copiously featured on the pages of North Korean state newspapers. South Korean officials said on Thursday they believe Pyongyang has sold Russia “short-range ballistic missiles and portable anti-aircraft missiles in addition to artillery rounds” to be used against Ukraine, according to the South Korean news agency Yonhap.
North Korea’s initial response to the Hamas massacre on October 7 was to condemn Israel for allegedly provoking the mass killing of civilians.
“The international community calls the conflict the consequence of Israel’s ceaseless criminal actions against the people of Palestine,” Rodong Sinmun, the national state newspaper of North Korea, proclaimed on October 10.
North Korean officials also denied evidence that weapons made in the country had reached Hamas, dismissing the accusations as “groundless” while offering support for Hamas’s viewpoint.
“The U.S. administration’s reptile press bodies and quasi-experts are spreading a groundless and false rumor that ‘[N]orth Korea’s weapons’ seemed to be used for the attack on Israel,” a “commentary” in the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) declared on October 13.
“It is nothing but a bid to shift the blame for the Middle East crisis caused by (the United States’) wrong hegemonic policy onto a third country and thus evade the international criticism focused on the empire of evil,” KCNA declared.
In reality, Israeli government officials believe weapons confiscated from Hamas terrorists appear to be North Korean, though they have yet to directly accuse North Korea of arming Hamas, rather than sending weapons to its allies in Tehran.
“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,” Israeli Ambassador to South Korea Akiva Tor told Voice of America News (VOA) on October 17.
Unnamed officials with the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) have told reporters similarly that rockets used in the October 7 attack appeared to be North Korean in origin.
Rockets are launched by Palestinian militants from the Gaza Strip towards Israel, in Gaza, Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023. The militant Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip carried out an unprecedented, multi-front attack on Israel at daybreak Saturday, firing thousands of rockets as dozens of Hamas fighters infiltrated the heavily fortified border in several locations by air, land, and sea and catching the country off-guard on a major holiday (AP Photo/Hatem Moussa).
“Hamas is believed to be directly or indirectly linked to North Korea in various areas, such as the weapons trade, tactical guidance, and training,” an unnamed JCS official told UPI in October. “There is a possibility that North Korea could use Hamas’ attack methods for a surprise invasion of South Korea.”
Speaking to Radio Free Asia (RFA), former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) officer Bruce Bechtol explained at the time that North Korea works closely with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a U.S.-designated terrorist organization that formally operates as a wing of the Iranian military.
“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 noted.
