North Korea says the balloons are a response to leaflets thrown across the border by activists in South Korea.

North Korea launched more Garbage-carrying balloons according to the South Korean military, following a similar campaign earlier in the week that Pyongyang said was retaliation for activists flying anti-North Korean leaflets across the border.

South Korea's Defense Ministry did not immediately comment on the number of balloons or how many landed in South Korea. South Korea's Yonhap news agency, citing anonymous military sources, said officials found about 90 balloons dropping paper and plastic trash and cigarette butts in areas of the capital Seoul and nearby Gyeonggi Province on Saturday night.

The military advised people to be careful of falling objects and not to touch items suspected of being from North Korea, but instead to report them to the military or police. There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.

In Seoul, the city government sent out text message warnings saying that unknown objects suspected of originating from North Korea had been spotted in the sky above the city. The military was responding.

The North's balloon launches are part of a series of recent provocative moves, including the failed launch of a spy satellite and a barrage of short-range missile launches this week that the North said were designed to demonstrate its ability to launch a preemptive attack on the South.

South Korea's military dispatched rapid chemical reaction force and explosive ordnance disposal teams to recover the wreckage of some 260 North Korean balloons found in different parts of the country from Tuesday night into Wednesday. The military said the balloons were carrying various types of garbage and fertilizer, but no hazardous materials such as chemical, biological or radioactive substances. Some of the balloons were fitted with time fuses, suggesting they were designed to burst the garbage bags in mid-air.

In a statement on Wednesday, Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, confirmed that the North sent the balloons to carry out her country's recent threat to “scatter mountains of waste paper and dirt” in South Korea in response to leaflet campaigns by South Korean activists.

She suggested that balloons could become the North's standard response to leaflet distribution in the future, saying that the North would respond by “scattering dozens of times more garbage than we scatter.”

South Korea's military has said it has no plans to shoot down the balloons, citing concerns that they could cause damage or that the balloons may contain dangerous substances. Shooting balloons near the border also risks triggering retaliation from the North at a time of high tension.

“[We] “We decided that the best thing to do was to drop the balloons and recover them safely,” said Lee Sung Joon, spokesman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the South Korean Armed Forces, during a press conference on Thursday.

North Korea is extremely sensitive to any outside attempt to undermine Kim Jong Un's absolute control over the country's 26 million people, most of whom have little access to foreign news.

In 2020, North Korea blew up an empty South Korean-built liaison office on its territory following an angry response to leaflet campaigns by South Korean civilians. In 2014, North Korea shot at propaganda balloons flying toward its territory, and South Korea returned fire, although there were no casualties.

In 2022, North Korea even claimed that balloons launched from South Korea caused a COVID-19 outbreak in the isolated country, a highly questionable claim that appeared to be an attempt to blame the South for the deterioration of inter-Korean relations.