North Korea’s fingerprints all over Hamas weapons and Hezbollah tunnels

Last week, North Korea launched its latest intercontinental ballistic missile, the Hwasong-19, which reached deep into space before descending and plunging into the ocean. This event hardly registered in the international media, days before the American election and the latest episodes in the ongoing conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon.

While North Korea is 8,000 km distant from Israel, it has been a quiet actor, militarily and technologically, in assisting Iran, Syria and Hezbollah over many decades. Even the Houthis in Yemen possess the Hwasong-6 in their arsenal.

But perhaps the most damning fact is that Hamas’s mass murder of October 7 was carried out with North Korean weapons. An examination of weapons left at the site of the massacre included North Korea’s F-7 rocket-propelled grenade and a Type 58 self-loading rifle, a variant of the Kalashnikov assault rifle.

On October 26, Agence France-Presse reported that an Israeli military official had estimated that 10% of the weapons used by Hamas three weeks earlier had originated in North Korea. Bang-122 artillery shells, produced by North Korea, were found, strewn on the ground, at the border with Gaza.

Military cooperation between Hamas and Kim Jong-Un’s regime in Pyongyang is not new. It stretches back, via Iran and Syria, over several decades.

Twenty years ago, Pyongyang supervised the construction of Hezbollah’s underground facilities in a labyrinth of tunnels. This allowed for the storage of food and medical equipment – and missile and arms dumps. North Korean guidance was based on its extensive technological expertise in tunnelling below the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) between the two Koreas.

During Israel’s 33-day incursion into Lebanon in 2006, the IDF could not understand how the firing of Hezbollah’s missiles could continue unabated, without cessation. The constant cascade of Katyushas essentially forced a depopulation of northern Israel - 43 Israelis were killed and more than 4,000 were injured. The Arab media produced an explanation shortly afterwards.

With the assistance of several Iranian engineers and technicians, as well as North Korean experts, who travelled to Lebanon disguised as servants for the Iranian embassy and its officers, Hezbollah has successfully built a 25km-long underground belt, with 12-metre openings along it. Every four openings are connected to one another through an easily accessible passageway. (Asharq Ali-Awsat July 29, 2006)

North Korea continued to deliver arms to Hezbollah after its perceived success in the Lebanon war.  A ship named Grigorio 1 was detained in Cyprus and found to be carrying arms, bound for Syria and probably for delivery to Hezbollah. The 18 truck-mounted mobile radar systems were officially listed as “weather observation equipment”. A UN report in 2010 suggested that North Korea had become remarkably adept at masking its intentions and operated through “multiple layers of intermediaries”.

In 2021, the Alma Research Center in Israel revealed that a larger tunnel in southern Lebanon, 45 km in length, had been discovered. It had been completed with the assistance of KOMID, a North Korean front company, at a cost of US$13 million. Alma’s report detailed underground command centres, field clinics and camouflaged vertical shafts to fire missiles from underground.

It allowed the movement of Hezbollah forces from one zone of conflict to another, as well as the quick transportation of surface-to-surface missiles to underground firing sites.

Hezbollah had long ago established front companies such as Jihad Construction and the Mustafa Commercial and Contracting Company. They were ostensibly there for the benefit of the Shi’ite community – but in reality it was to build a sophisticated network of tunnels.

According to Tal Beeri, the director of Alma’s Research Department, much of the information about Hezbollah’s network of tunnels was discoverable as open-source intelligence. (This included a 2007 video in which Imad Mughniyeh, the then Hezbollah second-in-command, was seen inside an attack tunnel. Mughniyeh, who had been charged in Argentina for the attack on the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992, was killed by a car bomb in Damascus in 2008.)

There were different types of tunnels, designed for different purposes including those which were specifically boobytrapped to kill Israeli soldiers in a repeat of the Hamas attack in 2023. Unlike Palestinian nationalists, Palestinian Islamists have never wished to compromise with Israel over a shared land.
The killings at the Nova festival were not an exception to the rule but the rule itself. Nasrallah and his minions in Hezbollah would have gladly repeated the mass murder.

According to the IDF, the highly mobile Hezbollah Radwan force – named after Mughniyeh (al-Hajj Radwan) – had planned to enter the tunnel via a shaft in the main street of Kafr Kila on the Lebanese side of the border and emerge near Metula on the Israeli side. On motorbikes, they would have proceeded to replicate the events of October 7 but this time in Metula.

Hamas, too, acquired the expertise of tunnel construction and warfare. Reports in the media have suggested that some tunnels found in Gaza were wide enough for vehicles to drive through.

This may explain why Israeli spotters noticed little before October 7. Hamas forces could be transported underground in tunnels to then suddenly appear just a few metres away from the border with Israel.

Assad’s regime in Syria was a willing conduit for the delivery of arms to Hezbollah in Lebanon and to Hamas in Gaza. It is believed that members of Hezbollah travelled to Pyongyang to receive intensive training from the North Koreans. Yet Assad had his own ambitions – nuclear ambitions.

Twenty years ago, North Korean nuclear scientists were spotted working with Syrian colleagues as part of Pyongyang’s nuclear assistance program to Syria.  Despite the White House’s opposition, Israel bombed and destroyed the Syrian nuclear facilities in the Deir ez-Zor region in September 2007.

The Syrian reactor bore an uncanny resemblance to North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear facility, which contained a gas-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor, capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium. Social media even displayed a photograph of Ibrahim Othman, the director-general of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission, standing arm-in-arm with Chon Chibu, a North Korean nuclear scientist who worked at the Yongbyon facility.

Even though North Korean personnel were killed in the strike on the reactor, Pyongyang continued to supply nuclear materiel and know-how to the Syrians.

In addition to Syria, Pyongyang also looked kindly upon Iran, having established diplomatic relations in April 1973. A couple of months later, 20 North Korean pilots took part in dog fights with Israeli jets during the Yom Kippur war in the skies above Egypt.

After the Islamic Revolution, Iran’s ayatollahs also benefited greatly from North Korean help. The Iranian Shahab-1 and Shahab-2 short-range ballistic missiles were based on the North Korean Scud-B, C, Hwasong-5 and 6 missiles. The Shahab-3 resembles the North Korean Nodong missile.

The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s presented a golden opportunity for North Korea to supply arms and missiles to Teheran. A cash-strapped Pyongyang gratefully received Iranian funds in exchange. It is believed that in 1987, Iran purchased in the region of 100 Scud-B missiles at a cost of US$500 million.

In 2024, Pyongyang’s animosity to Israel seems to know no bounds. Fifty years ago, it willingly trained members of the Black September team that killed Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. Today its permanent representative at the UN has argued that his country “fully supported the Palestinians’ struggle to expel Israeli aggressors from their territory”.

This long-term cooperation between North Korea and Iran is perhaps the most blatant example of the so-called red-green alliance: a Stalinist monarchy working with medieval Islamists to destroy a modern Hebrew republic.