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.