South Korea’s new defense minister, who was inaugurated over the weekend, repeated his pledge on Tuesday to suspend a 2018 military agreement with North Korea “as soon as possible,” in the clearest indicator to date that the landmark deal’s days may be numbered.

Speaking to local media on Tuesday, Shin Won-shik also compared South Korea to Israel in an apparent bid to justify the scrapping of the military agreement.

Shin described Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel as a result of failed reconnaissance, comparing it to the inter-Korean situation — but claimed that South Korea faces a much worse threat than