North Korea's Link to Hamas

Global Asia

THE WAR BETWEEN Israel and Hamas in Gaza has inadvertently highlighted another aspect of the conflicts in the Middle East: North Korea’s relations with Islamic militants in the region. The so-called Gaza Metro — a nickname for the maze of subterranean passageways that stretches for 311 miles under the strip of land Hamas controls on the borders with Israel and Egypt, according to Hamas leaders themselves in 2021 — bears the distinct hallmarks of North Korean tunneling technology. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) also have put on display North Korean-made F-7 rocket-propelled grenades, which they claim Hamas used during its Oct. 7 cross-border attacks that killed at least 1,200 people. The Associated Press, quoting Matt Schroeder, a senior researcher with Small Arms Survey, reported on Oct. 19 that Hamas has also on its own social media sites published images of its fighters with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher bearing the distinctive red stripe across its warhead, and other design elements matching the North Korean F-7.

A more important sign of North Korean involvement are the Hamas tunnels, the construction of which, however, may have been indirect via another partner in the anti-Israeli bloc in the Middle East: Hezbollah in Lebanon. Like Hezbollah, Hamas is supported by Iran — and got its tunneling knowledge from the North Koreans, who are world experts in such technology as shown by the network of tunnels under the Demilitarized Zone that separates North Korea from South Korea. The construction of tunnels and other underground facilities in Lebanon may have begun as early as 2000, but were discovered only after the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, and it appears that those installations were built right next to outposts of UN peacekeepers without anybody noticing.

COMPLEX RELATIONS

The most extensive study of the tunnels in southern Lebanon, and North Korea’s role in their construction, has been done by the Alma Research and Education Center, which published a report in July 2021 titled Hezbollah’s Land of Tunnels — the North-Korean-Iranian Connection. Alma is an Israel-based organization, and while many of its researchers have a background in Israel’s intelligence services, no serious observer has questioned the accuracy of its reporting. According to the report: “Hezbollah’s model is the same as the North Korean model: tunnels in which hundreds of combatants, fully equipped, can pass stealthily and rapidly underground.”

According to Alma, Hezbollah’s tunnels were built with assistance from the Korea Mining Development Trading Corporation (KOMID), an entity linked to the export of equipment related to the manufacture of ballistic missiles and conventional weapons in a number of countries, among them Iran, Syria and Libya. The construction of the tunnels in Lebanon, Alma states, was carried out in collaboration with Hezbollah’s Jihad Construction Foundation, a branch of Jihad Construction of Iran.

Outside the Middle East, KOMID has assisted Myanmar’s military authorities in missile development as well as the construction of underground military installations at the new capital Naypyidaw, the military base at Aungban in Shan State, and near the Defense Services Academy in Pyin Oo Lwin. According to intelligence sources in the region, these include arms stores, underground communications centers with fiber optic cables, communication tunnels, and bomb shelters. Apart from North Korean tunneling expertise, Myanmar received North Korean truck-mounted multiple rocket launchers, and possibly also surface-to-air missiles for its Chinese-supplied naval vessels.

There is a difference, though, between North Korea’s own, wide tunnels and those in Lebanon and Gaza, which can be understood by taking into account divergent military requirements. According to a study published on Oct. 23 by the Modern War Institute at West Point, Hamas tunnels “are almost all very narrow, largely because of the prefabricated concrete sides and tops Hamas favors to build them. The average Hamas tunnel is just two meters high and a meter wide, making entering, moving through, fighting in them extremely hard.” By contrast, North Korea’s tunnels are meant for invasion of South Korea and are wide enough for armored cars and other vehicles. One even has a narrow-gauge railroad.

Another reason for the difference between North Korea’s invasion tunnels and Hamas’ underground installations, the study states, is that Israel’s ability to use advanced technology to detect the tunnels has forced Hamas to dig its tunnels “deeper and deeper. In 2020, Israel found a Hamas tunnel that descended 230 feet below the surface, the deepest found up to that point.” Hamas tunnels today have electricity from generators, air ventilation, water pipes and stockpiles of food that, according to the Modern War Institute, “will allow the group’s fighters to better withstand the most basic challenges, like normal exhaustion, that result from urban siege and isolation.”

A LONG HISTORY OF FRIENDSHIP AND SUPPORT

Hezbollah and its main backers in Iran may be Shia Muslims, while Hamas, which was founded in 1987 as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, is a Sunni group found mainly in Egypt. But the two seemingly disparate entities have found a common enemy in Israel, and backers and partners in Iran as well as North Korea. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), founded in 1964, was the first Palestinian group to establish a relationship with Pyongyang. The PLO, then headed by the late Yasser Arafat, is believed to have made contacts with the North Koreans through Egypt, which at that time had a close relationship with North Korea. Joseph Bermudez, a North Korea expert, writes in his book Terrorism: The North Korean Connection that Pyongyang first began to provide financial assistance and training to a small number of PLO members in the mid-1960s. Co-operation between the PLO and North Korea increased dramatically after the Palestinian militants were forced out of Jordan in September 1970, an event that became known as “Black September” because of the savage nature in which Jordanian forces carried out operations against them. The PLO and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) had turned parts of Jordan into a base for their activities, and even invited terrorist groups from Europe such as the German Baader-Meinhof Gang to join them.

A month before “Black September,” a PLO delegation had travelled to Pyongyang, where they were greeted by the then North Korean leader Kim Il Sung himself. In September, George Habash, leader of the PFLP, also went to Pyongyang and was promised assistance. Habash was in North Korea at the time his group hijacked American, British and Swiss aircraft to the Jordanian desert and blew them up, actions that were the final straw that prompted the Jordanians to move against the Palestinian militants. The battles continued until July 1971, when King Hussein declared that Jordanian sovereignty had been completely restored.

During Habash’s trip to Pyongyang, links were also established between the PFLP and the Japanese Red Army, which led to a bloody attack carried out by a team of Japanese militants at Lod airport near Tel Aviv in 1972. Twenty-six people were killed, including 16 Puerto Ricans on a pilgrimage to religious sites in Israel. During that time, several hundred Palestinians were being trained in North Korea and weapons reached the PLO and the PFLP through Syria. According to Bermudez, courses for the Palestinians in North Korea included officer training, logistics, intelligence, special operations and communications. Palestinians were also trained in what was then the People’s Republic of Yemen, which merged with North Yemen in 1990. Special Purpose Corps instructors from North Korea taught the Palestinians to use explosives, bombs, and booby traps, and how to organize kidnappings and assassinations.

In November 1981, Yasser Arafat paid another visit to Pyongyang and was promised increased financial and military aid. According to Bermudez: “This aid was forthcoming; and, by January 1982, approximately 300 DPRK [North Korean] personnel, supported primarily by Syria, were in Lebanon” to train PLO fighters, and, during the July 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the IDF reportedly captured 24 and killed approximately 25 DPRK nationals.” The IDF also captured a large quantity of North Korean-made weapons, among them hand grenades and rocket launchers.

In March 1989, North Korea and the PLO decided to upgrade the latter’s office in Pyongyang to that of the embassy of the State of Palestine, with Arafat as president. Three months later, Kim Il Sung received Arafat in Pyongyang, and said: “I, on behalf of the Workers’ Party of Korea, the government of the Republic and the Korean people, and on my own behalf, warmly welcome the esteemed comrade president and members of the delegation of the State of Palestine. I also take this opportunity to extend militant greetings to the Palestinian people who have gallantly turned out in the widely popular resistance movement for the freedom and liberation of their fatherland.”

IT'S NOW ABOUT THE MONEY

What may have been motivated by “anti-imperialist solidarity” at a time when North Korea was economically stronger than it is today, relations with Islamic militants in the Middle East seem to have turned into little more than money-making undertakings for the cash-strapped Pyongyang regime. That goes for North Korea’s close relations with Hezbollah, Hamas, and, especially, the Islamic Republic of Iran, a seemingly unlikely ally of a country that is staunchly atheist. Iran’s Shahab missile systems, which come in six variants, were developed with assistance from Pyongyang, and are modified versions of North Korea’s Hwasong missiles. During the first Gulf War in 1990-1991, North Korea reportedly supplied Iran with a range of military hardware, including artillery, anti-aircraft machine guns, mortars, ammunition, tanks, small arms, naval mines and anti-tank and surface-to-air missiles. It is in this context that Pyongyang’s dealings with rogue and isolated governments such as Myanmar’s military junta also should be seen. It’s all about money, not whatever ideology the North Koreans say they adhere to.

North Korea does from time-to-time issue statements that reflect “the old days” such as a KCNA dispatch dated Oct. 26, which denounced “Israel’s strike at a hospital,” referring to an explosion in the car park outside the al-Ahli hospital that not only US intelligence sources but also Human Rights Watch said turned out to be the result of a misfired Hamas missile, not an Israeli bomb, and went on to condemn the United States. In the usual ranting style of North Korean officials, “a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry” said: “The US, wrecker of global peace and strangler of justice, can never evade the blame for having connived at and fostered Israel’s hideous war crime that ruthlessly killed Palestinians.”

Such bloated rhetoric aside, money remains without a doubt the driving force behind North Korea’s continued involvement in the Middle East. Although North Korea has always consistently denied selling weapons to Palestinian groups, there are numerous reports to the contrary. In an article for The Telegraph on July 26, 2014, Con Coughlin, a journalist and author of several books about the Middle East, quoted Western security officials as saying that Hamas had struck a deal with North Korea “worth hundreds of thousands of dollars” for the purchase of weapons that would help replenish its stocks of missiles. “North Korea is an obvious place to seek supplies because Pyongyang already has close ties with a number of militant Islamist groups in the Middle East,” he said. That would be a reference to Hezbollah and its affiliated organizations in Lebanon as well as Syria. The deal was being handled by “a Lebanese-based trading company with close ties to the militant Palestinian organization [Hamas] based in east Beirut.” Coughlin also quoted Israeli commanders as saying that they believed that North Korean experts had “given Hamas advice on building the extensive network of tunnels in Gaza that has enabled fighters to move weapons without detection by Israeli drones, which maintain a constant monitoring operation over Gaza.”

That was not the first time that reports about military deals between North Korea and actors in the Middle East appeared in the media. In December 2009, a Georgia-registered, Soviet-designed Ilyushin IL-76 cargo plane was forced to make an emergency landing in Bangkok. Tipped off by US intelligence, the Thais inspected the cargo, which was supposed to be “drilling equipment” but turned out to be sealed boxes containing 35 tonnes of North Korean-made weapons, including surface-to-air missiles, rocket launchers and missile tubes. The crew, four from Kazakhstan and one from Belarus, claimed that their next destination was Sri Lanka, but after more scrutiny it turned out to be Tehran, where the guns would be forwarded to Hezbollah and possibly also Hamas.

Even if it is money that matters, decades of friendship between North Korea and Palestinian organizations have also developed strong, personal bonds between their respective representatives. As reported by the independent website NK News on Nov. 29, 2021, Palestinian ambassador Ismail Ahmed Mohamed Hasan, who was posted as ambassador to Pyongyang in April 2009, was the longest-serving foreign diplomat in Pyongyang before he had to leave the country for China because of the Covid-19 pandemic. He has not returned to North Korea, but his daughter Jindallae Safara’ini, who was born in Pyongyang in 1984 when her father first served there from 1982-1992, has become something of a North Korean celebrity. She is now believed to be working as a nurse in Beijing, but considers herself a “foster daughter” of Kim Il Sung and heads the Jindallae Fund, a foundation she set up to help North Korean children — a gift, she says, to repay North Korea and its leaders for all their “love and affection.” She has also made several appearances on North Korean television.

Whether it’s about such personal bonds, money or hollow declarations of everlasting friendship, an axis of like-minded, renegade players has emerged on the scene in the Middle East: Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and allied forces in Syria. And North Korea has become a major partner in a wide field of activities ranging from missile development to tunnel technology and the exchange of military expertise and weaponry.