North Korea condemned Israel for making the Gaza Strip “into a huge human slaughterhouse and place of massacring children” after the recent violent conflict between Israel and Hamas.
“Israel’s horrific crime of killing the bud-like children, yet to be bloomed, is a severe challenge to the future of humankind and a crime against humanity,” said the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Friday. “It is no exaggeration to say that the whole Gaza Strip has turned into a huge human slaughterhouse and a place of massacring children. Soon after the end of the bombardment, [Israel Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and the Israeli authorities are trying to conceal their crime of killing even the children,” the ministry continued.
The most recent conflicts between Israel and Hamas displaced over 100,000 in the Gaza Strip. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said about 240 Palestinians and at least 12 Israeli died from the 11 days of conflict. After a month of rising tensions, both Hamas and Israel agreed to a ceasefire. Pyongyang considers Israel as an “imperialist satellite” that runs against its government’s anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist ideology. For decades, the family of Kim Jong-un has sided with Palestinian militant groups.
In the 1990s, former Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il assisted former Palestinian ambassador to North Korea, Mustafa Safarini, with fertility treatment after developing a close relationship with the official, according to NK News. Pyongyang’s solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement has earned the DPRK a diplomatic link to the Arab nation.
The North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs also added that international news outlets are “strongly condemning Israel for continuing to massacre children, pointing at Israel as a culprit of expulsion of Palestinians, illegal settlement expansion and sowing the seeds of hatred by suppressing their peaceful praying ceremony.” The DPRK’s statements came on June 4th, which the United Nations designated as the International Day of Innocent Children Victims of Aggression, to mark Israel’s “acts of aggression” against a “great number of innocent Palestinian and Lebanese children victims” in August 1982.