Ballistic missile fired during Iranian war ga
Ballistic missile fired during Iranian war gaReuters

Islamic Jihad has “many more surprises up its sleeve,” said Abdullah Shalah, head of the terror group said Sunday. In an interview on an Arab satellite station, Shalah said that “We have a store of strategic weapons that we have never used,” but was prepared to bring out against Israel if the war in Gaza continued. With that, he did not specify what those weapons were.

According to sources in Gaza, those weapons are Iranian-made “Zelzal” missiles, an unguided missile that can carry a payload of up to 600 kg (1,323 pounds) of explosives for a distance of up to 200 kilometers. Speaking to the Donia Alwattan news site, the sources, which claim to be close to Islamic Jihad, did not say how many such missiles the terror group had, adding that “this is their 'judgement day' weapon.”

Reports in the past have said that Iran had supplied these missiles to Hebollah as far back as 2006, but they were apparently not used during the Second Lebanon War, Israeli officials said. The Zelzal missiles could be deflected or neutralized by the Patriot missile system, or Israel's own Arrow protection system.

Earlier Sunday, a report in the British newspaper The Telegraph said that Hamas had signed an arms deal with North Korea in order to replenish its depleted rocket arsenal, after thousands were either fired at Israeli civilians or destroyed in IDF strikes in recent weeks. The report cited senior security sources who claimed that the deal, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, had already been signed, having been made via Lebanese intermediaries. Hamas has reportedly made an initial down payment in cash to Pyongyang, and is hoping for an imminent delivery to Gaza.

According to Israeli intelligence sources, North Korea has been providing other forms of aid to Hamas as well. North Korean experts are believed to have played a crucial role in helping Hamas build its vast network of "terror tunnels", designed to enable deadly infiltration attacks into Israel, based on the model of the authoritarian state's own complex tunnel network under the Demilitarized Zone with South Korea - believed to be the most sophisticated such network in the world.