North Korea Is Fighting Israel on the DL

By Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, Attorney and Author

When President George W. Bush delivered his State of the Union address months after the 9/11 attacks, and identified Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as an Axis of Evil, he made a point to say, “North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction while starving its citizens.” That description eerily applies to what Hamas has done in Gaza. It should therefore come as no surprise that the Hermit Kingdom and the fundamentalist Islamic terror group have become dangerous and clandestine allies who together have set the Middle East on fire.

The Pyongyang-Gaza nexus is not new. In 2009, authorities in Thailand grounded a North Korean cargo plane carrying 35 tons of small arms, rockets, and antitank rocket-propelled grenades that were destined for Hamas in Gaza via Tehran. Over the years, especially after the 2014 Protective Edge war in Gaza, North Korea ramped up its support of Hamas, providing the terror group with a vast arsenal of small arms, rockets, missile technology, explosives, and millions of rounds of ammunition. The Israeli military could not help but notice that the two most ubiquitous weapons used to kill 1,200 Israelis and wound thousands more on Oct. 7 were the Type 58 7.62mm assault rifle, a North Korean knockoff of the Soviet-era AK-47, and the F-7, a lethal and modified North Korean copy of the Soviet RPG-7 shoulder-fired antitank rocket. The NIS, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, confirmed that Hamas used North Korean-made weapons in the attack on Israel.

North Korea produces inexpensive battle-ready weapons. Rogue nations like Iran have the money to pay for these tools of war and need to supply their proxy armies in Lebanon, Yemen, and Gaza. The underground arms trade skirts international embargoes and legal scrutiny, and enriches a small cabal of Kim Dynasty insiders, Revolutionary Guardsmen, smugglers, and middlemen at the expense of thousands of innocent lives murdered, injured, and abducted. The F-7s, and other North Korean-made weapons, were shipped to Iran, and then transported to North Africa or Lebanon and the Sinai Desert to be smuggled by ship or via underground tunnels into the hands of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

People sit in front of a screen showing a news broadcast with file footage of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and his wife Ri Sol-ju, at a railway station in Seoul on June 5, 2022.ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Common sense would dictate that North Korea would have little interest in being complicit in what happens in Israel, a nation seven time zones and 5,000 miles away. That same common sense would also dictate that a fanatical ultra-Stalinist communist state at the far northeastern end of Asia would have little to do with the Islamic Republic of Iran, a Shiite state exporting a fundamentalist revolution across the world. But the Axis of Evil makes for strange bedfellows, and political and religious ideological differences are often overlooked when it comes to the cold cash deposits of illicit arms sales.

In all fairness to the current regime of Kim Jong-Un, Pyongyang has played a role in conflicts against Israel for over 50 years, even sending MiG pilots to fly combat missions for Egypt during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. North Korea has been providing military and financial support to Palestinian terror groups as far back as 1966, particularly those groups that shared its socialist and communist ideologies. North Korea provided pivotal assistance—weapons, money, documents, and covert diplomatic cover—to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the inventors of hijacking, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the terror group that perpetrated the slaughter of more than 30 children in Ma’alot, Israel, in 1974.

The bloodiest handprint of North Korea’s involvement in Palestinian terror came in the planning and execution of what became known as the Lod Airport Massacre. On May 30, 1972, three Japanese Red Army terrorists removed assault rifles and grenades from their luggage at Israel’s Lod Airport and proceeded to open fire on the crowded baggage claim and arrival area. By the time the shooting stopped, 26 people were dead and 80 seriously wounded. The attack was perpetrated in the name of the PFLP and the Japanese Red Army terrorists acting on behalf of their Palestinian commanders had been recruited and trained in North Korea. North Korea provided the weapons and the logistical support needed to carry out the attacks, as well as the money to pull it off.

Most of those killed and wounded at Lod were U.S. citizens, mainly Puerto Rican congregants visiting the Holy Land on a religious pilgrimage. In 2008, my law office, along with our U.S. co-counsel, represented eight surviving children of the Lod Airport Massacre in a lawsuit filed in U.S. federal court in San Juan against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for their material support to the PFLP and the Japanese Red Army. The precedent-setting legal action was based on the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976, a law that grants U.S. District Courts certain degrees of jurisdictional authority in civil actions against a terror-sponsoring foreign state. Although the North Koreans did not respond to the lawsuit, a federal court ordered Pyongyang to pay $328 million in damages for their complicity in the attack.

Since American citizens were killed, wounded, and abducted at gunpoint by Hamas terrorists carrying North Korean arms on Oct. 7, the victims and their families should file lawsuits in U.S. federal courts seeking damages. The defendants must include members of the North Korean government, along with the cabal of sycophants who enable supreme leader Kim Jong-Un. These court actions must target members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who bought North Korean weapons for the terror groups and then profited from their transfer to Hamas. The Palestinian middlemen, whose smuggling networks delivered these weapons to Gaza, must also be targeted. These sinister people have made hundreds of millions of dollars trafficking weapons bought and paid for with the specific aim of killing civilians. They must also face their day in court for their criminal pursuits.

To add teeth to this legal campaign, the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the European Union must enact and enforce strict sanctions on these North Korean, Iranian, and Palestinian insiders. Sanctions will freeze and seize the overseas holdings, real estate properties, and lavish bank accounts that they have amassed in the terror arms trade. Sanctions will also target other tentacles of Iran’s proxy army that have been recipients of North Korean weapons, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.

To make sure that there are no more days like Oct. 7, every effort must be made to ensure that the leaders and terror oligarchs of the Axis of Resistance are undermined and permanently weakened. Money and civil litigation are an important weapon in this campaign.

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner is an Israeli attorney and the best-selling co-author of Harpoon: Inside the Covert War Against Terrorism’s Money Masters (Hachette Books 2017).