Seoul warned the public on Saturday to avoid more balloons sent from North Korea and to report them to the military or police.
South Korea’s military said North Korea was sending more balloons carrying “filth” across the heavily fortified border.
North Korea sent hundreds of balloons carrying trash and excrement earlier this week, calling them “gifts of sincerity” and vowing to send more. The South Korean defence minister, Shin Won-sik, on Saturday described it as “unimaginably petty and low-grade behaviour”.
A public message broadcast by the city of Seoul asked the public to refrain from touching balloons “identified in the sky near Seoul” and to report them as they were “being handled by the military”.
Other regional governments had been asked to broadcast similar messages, the defence ministry said.
North Korea has said the balloons were retaliation for an ongoing propaganda campaign by North Korean defectors and activists in South Korea, who send balloons containing anti-Pyongyang leaflets, food, medicine, money and USB sticks loaded with K-pop music videos and dramas across the border.
The South Korean parliament passed a law in 2020 criminalising the act of sending leaflets to the North, but the activists did not stop.
That same year, Pyongyang, blaming the anti-North leaflets, unilaterally cut off all official military and political communication links with the South and blew up an inter-Korean liaison office on its side of the border.
Last year, South Korea’s constitutional court struck down the 2020 law, calling it an undue limitation on free speech.
Kim Jong-un’s sister Kim Yo-jong – one of North Korea’s key spokespeople – mocked South Korea for complaining about the balloons this week, saying North Koreans were simply exercising their freedom of expression.