North Korea denies giving weapons to Hamas for war against Israel

Asserting that the accusation made in some media reports was an attempt by Washington to shift responsibility for the crisis from itself to a third country, North Korea denied on Friday that its weapons were used by Hamas in the strike against Israel. This week, military specialists claimed that images from the conflict suggested that Hamas militants may have been armed with North Korean weapons, possibly F-7 rocket-propelled grenades. According to Bruce Bechtol, a professor at Angelo State University in Texas who has studied North Korea’s arms sales, there have been rumours of Hamas operating the F-7 for a number of years. “This could be new supplies or from previous shipments going back as far as 2009,” he told the media, adding that in any case the weapons likely took an indirect route to Hamas from North Korea through Iran or Syria. KCNA, the official news agency of North Korea, described the allegations that its weapons were used in the assaults as “a baseless and false rumour.” “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,” it said. The red band surrounding the warhead of the F-7 makes it simple to distinguish it from comparable RPGs, according to European experts Joost Oliemans and Stijn Mitzer. Photos posted by the Israeli Defence Force and other social media accounts show such red bands. The F-7 and a few North Korean Bulsae-2 anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) were also observed being used by Hamas in combat in 2021, according to the researchers at the time. John Kirby, a spokesperson for the U.S. National Security Council, stated on Thursday that he was unable to confirm the allegations regarding the origin of the rockets being utilised by Hamas. The Israel-Hamas conflict will not have an impact on the United States’ security policy elsewhere in the world, especially on the Korean peninsula, Kirby continued. Israel was cited earlier this week by the official media of North Korea as the cause of the carnage in Gaza. The bloodiest Palestinian militant attack on Israeli territory in Israeli history, carried out by Hamas, marked the start of the most recent Israel-Palestinian conflict over the weekend. (With agency inputs)