Seoul, South Korea (CNN) — North Korea has fired more than 200 artillery rounds off its west coast, near South Korea’s Baengnyeong and Yeonpyeong islands, South Korean authorities said Friday.
The artillery fell within the buffer zone, north of the NLL (Northern Limit Line), between 9 and 11 a.m., said South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). It added that no damage has been done to any civilians or military.
North Korea resumed firing artillery within the buffer zone after scrapping an inter-Korean military agreement last November, said the JCS, which called Friday’s incident a “provocative act that threatens peace and heightens tension on the Korean Peninsula.”
North Korea previously fired multiple rounds of artillery into maritime buffer zones in late 2022.
The South Korean military is now working with the US to track and monitor related movements, and will take “actions corresponding to North Korea’s provocation,” the JCS added.
The Northern Limit Line is a disputed de facto border that was drawn up by the United Nations at the end of the Korean War in 1953. It runs three nautical miles from the North Korean coastline and put five islands close to the coast under South Korean control.
North Korea has proposed a different line – one that would roughly extend the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the two nations southwest out into the Yellow Sea, rather than hug the North Korean shoreline
Yeonpyeong Island lies off South Korea’s northwest coast, right by the border with its northern neighbor – and has been a flashpoint for years between the two sides.
In November 2010, following coastal military drills by South Korea, Pyongyang launched an attack on the island, killing two marines and two civilians. It prompted an island-wide evacuation, and South Korean forces returned fire.
The clash was one of the worst flare ups of violence in years; at the time, the secretary general of the United Nations called North Korea’s attack “one of the gravest incidents since the end of the Korean War.”
The war has technically never officially ended; an armistice that brought hostilities to a halt in 1953 – but there’s never been a peace treaty. Though diplomats in Seoul and Washington have in recent years discussed an agreement to end the war, those efforts have faltered as tensions in the Korean peninsula rose again – especially with Pyongyang ramping up its weapons development program and missile testing.
On Sunday, North Korean state-run agency KCNA reported that the hermit nation’s leader Kim Jong Un had said the state will no longer seek reconciliation and reunification with South Korea.
Kim said the inter-Korean relations have become “a relationship between two hostile countries and two belligerents at war,” according to the KCNA report. He reportedly added that if the US and South Korea attempt a military confrontation with the North, its “nuclear war deterrent will not hesitate to take serious action.”
