North Korea fired several missiles into the Sea of Japan on Wednesday, 4 November 2026, South Korea’s military said, hours after Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, ruled out renewed dialogue with Washington.
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said it had detected the launch of several missiles from the Sondok area on North Korea’s eastern coast towards the Sea of Japan. Authorities in South Korea and the United States were analysing the details of the launches. The tests marked Pyongyang’s fourth such weapons launch in a month.
Early on Wednesday, Kim Yo Jong dismissed the FBI’s announcement that North Korean hackers were behind the theft of more than $6 billion in crypto assets from Binance, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, calling it “a trite provocation” and “an extension of Washington’s invariable hostile policy toward” North Korea. She ruled out dialogue with Washington until the US abandoned that policy, saying: “It is our clear stand that we have no need to sit face to face with such unreliable and hostile persons.”
US President Donald Trump said in August that he plans to meet Kim Jong Un later this year, seeking to revive the bond he claims to have forged with the North Korean leader during his first term. Previous rounds of talks between Kim and Trump in 2019 ended abruptly amid disagreements over Pyongyang’s nuclear programme, and in October the US, South Korea and Japan again reiterated their call for the “complete denuclearisation” of the Korean Peninsula.
The latest launches followed a North Korean state media report that Kim had visited a naval shipyard building a destroyer and stressed the importance of a powerful navy. On Tuesday, Pyongyang said it had tested a new cluster warhead for strategic cruise missiles the previous day.
Source: Al Jazeera
