Kim Jong-Un is one of the strongest dictators in the world. Here’s North Korea’s stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
As the war between Hamas and Israel escalates by the day, countries are rushing to take sides. While the United States and the global West sided with Israel, Russia and China seem closer to the Palestinian cause. Likewise, North Korea appears as a staunch Palestinian ally.
North Korea is a dictatorial regime in East Asia bordering Russia, China, and South Korea. North Korea is ruled by the ruthless Kim Jong-Un, the richest and most powerful man in a country where 60% of the population lives below the poverty line.
Kim Jong-Un is a self-professed “enemy of the West”. On the other hand, South Korea is a close Western ally and one of the most thriving economies of this century. The reasons behind this divide are long and complex, tracing back to the inherently divisive period of the Cold War.
The Korean peninsula was split in two after the Second World War, “shared equally” between the Soviet Union (in the north) and the United States (in the south). With the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, both superpowers intervened directly.
It is important to note how the United States destroyed 85% of the North Korean buildings during the war. Essentially, it leveled North Korea to the ground. This is a crucial point to understand why North Korea constantly tests long-range missiles: they don’t want to bomb the South, which they consider a sibling separated at birth; they aim directly at the heart of America.
Is North Korea supporting Palestine?
While the Korean conflict is frozen for the moment, the Israeli-Palestinian war is very much active. After the horrific attack on Israeli territory by Hamas, Tel Aviv responded in kind with deadly raids on the Gaza Strip. Yesterday evening, a missile struck the Al-Ahli al-Arabi Hospital in Gaza, killing hundreds of civilians.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping immediately sided with Palestine, denouncing Israeli war crimes on the population of the strip.
North Korea obviously joined in this support, being a close Chinese and Russian ally. Last month, Kim Jong-Un met with Vladimir Putin in Russian territory. Western intelligence believes that North Korea supplies weapons to Russia for their illegal invasion of Ukraine.
Likewise, North Korea is allegedly supporting Hamas terrorists militarily. A former US intelligence officer deemed it “extremely likely” that weapons used by Hamas in their Saturday attacks came from North Korea.
According to Fred Fleitz, national security advisor under the Trump administration, Hamas received those weapons “either through a direct deal in which Hamas paid the North Koreans or through the IRGC, the Iranian Republic Guard Corps, they smuggled those weapons in or through Hezbollah.”
