A North Korean ballistic missile launch. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

North Korean exporting of missile and other military systems to countries and terrorist organizations around the world directly threatens the Jewish state, Israel’s Channel 2 reported on Monday.

According to Channel 2, Arab media outlets reported over the weekend that an arms shipment on its way to Hezbollah was attacked by the IDF in Syria late Thursday night/early Friday morning. The shipment, according to these sources, included advanced North Korean missiles. Channel 2 added that the nuclear reactor in Syria, which Israel destroyed in September 2007, was built for President Bashar Assad with the aid of the regime in Pyongyang.

As The Algemeiner reported last April, former US Vice President Dick Cheney’s national security adviser John Hannah, a senior counselor at the DC-based policy institute the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, penned a piece in the journal Foreign Affairs in which he said about the 2007 reactor-bombing — code-named “Operation Orchard” — that America “dodged a bullet in Syria…all courtesy of the Israelis.”

“Not only did [the Israelis] discover [it] in the nick of time,” Hannah said of the North Korean-built, plutonium-producing reactor in the town of Al-Kibar, in the desert east of Damascus. “They also carried out the attack that was almost certainly the only means of ensuring the reactor never went hot.”

Hanna used the story of active North Korean involvement in Syria nearly a decade ago to warn against its behavior today. “The greatest threat we face from [Supreme Leader] Kim Jong Un is probably not a suicidal attack against the United States or our allies in Northeast Asia with nuclear missiles,” he wrote. “Rather, the more likely danger is that North Korea’s tyrant sells part of his ever-expanding nuclear arsenal to other rogue actors that mean us harm.” He then went on to identify Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah, as particularly worthy of note and monitoring in this context.

Earlier this month, David Albright — head of the Institute for Science and International Security think tank — told The Algemeiner that paying attention to any potential nuclear cooperation between North Korea and Iran should be a priority for the Trump administration.