Iran’s president on Wednesday ordered the country to suspend its co-operation with the International Atomic Energy Agency after U.S. and Israeli airstrikes hit its most-important nuclear facilities, likely further limiting the ability of inspectors to track Tehran’s program that had been enriching uranium to near weapons-grade levels.
The order by President Masoud Pezeshkian included no timetables or details about what that suspension would entail.
Iranian state television announced President Masoud Pezeshkian’s order, which followed a law passed by Iran’s parliament to suspend that co-operation. The bill already received the approval of Iran’s constitutional watchdog, the Guardian Council, on Thursday, and likely the support of the country’s Supreme National Security Council, which Pezeshkian chairs.
There were no timetables or details given about what the suspension would entail.
“The government is mandated to immediately suspend all co-operation with the International Atomic Energy Agency under the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons and its related Safeguards Agreement,” state television quoted the bill as saying. “This suspension will remain in effect until certain conditions are met, including the guaranteed security of nuclear facilities and scientists.”
It wasn’t immediately clear what that would mean for the Vienna-based IAEA, the UN nuclear watchdog. The agency has long monitored Iran’s nuclear program and said that it was waiting for an official communication from Iran on what the suspension meant.
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Iran’s decision drew an immediate condemnation from Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar.
“Iran has just issued a scandalous announcement about suspending its co-operation with the IAEA,” he said in an X post. “This is a complete renunciation of all its international nuclear obligations and commitments.”
Saar urged European nations that were part of the 2015 multilateral nuclear deal with Iran to implement its so-called snapback clause. That would reimpose all UN sanctions on it originally lifted by Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers, if one of its Western parties declares the Islamic Republic is out of compliance with it.
Israel is widely believed to be the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East, and the IAEA doesn’t have access to its weapons-related facilities.
Inspections scaled back after 2018
Under the 2015 deal, Iran agreed to allow the IAEA even greater access to its nuclear program. That included permanently installing cameras and sensors at nuclear sites. Those cameras, inside of metal housings sprayed with a special blue paint that shows any attempt to tamper with it, took still images of sensitive sites.
Other devices, known as online enrichment monitors, measured the uranium enrichment level at Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility.
The IAEA also regularly sent inspectors into Iranian sites to conduct surveys, sometimes collecting environmental samples with cotton clothes and swabs that would be tested at IAEA labs back in Austria. Others monitor Iranian sites via satellite images.
U.S. President Donald Trump, in his first term in 2018, unilaterally withdrew Washington from the accord, insisting it wasn’t tough enough and didn’t address Iran’s missile program or its support for militant groups in the wider Middle East.
In the years since that decision, Iran has limited IAEA inspections and stopped the agency from accessing camera footage. It has also removed cameras. At one point, Iran accused an IAEA inspector of testing positive for explosive nitrates, something the agency disputed.
Damage assessment at sites continues
The IAEA has engaged in years of negotiations with Iran to restore full access for its inspectors. While Tehran hasn’t granted that, it also hasn’t entirely thrown inspectors out. Analysts view this as part of Iran’s wider strategy to use its nuclear program as a bargaining chip with the West.
Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal allowed Iran to enrich uranium to 3.67 per cent — enough to fuel a nuclear power plant, but far below the threshold of 90 per cent needed for weapons-grade uranium. It also drastically reduced Iran’s stockpile of uranium, limited its use of centrifuges and relied on the IAEA to oversee Tehran’s compliance through additional oversight.
In May, reports from the IAEA indicated that Iran had been enriching up to 60 per cent. It also has enough of a stockpile to build multiple nuclear bombs, should it choose to do so. Iran has long insisted its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.
Israel began a sustained campaign of airstrikes on Iranian targets on June 13, which included its nuclear sites, as well as targeting several of the country’s physicists and scientists who were alleged to have worked on the nuclear program.
Days later, the U.S. participated in the military campaign with strikes on the Fordow, Natanza and Isfahan nuclear sites, with American B-2 bombers using bunker-buster bombs at Fordow, a site built under a mountain about 100 kilometres southwest of Tehran.
Satellite images from Planet Labs PBC analyzed by The Associated Press show Iranian officials at Fordow on Monday likely examining the damage. Trucks could be seen in the images, as well as at least one crane and an excavator at tunnels on the site.
Iran open to talks at some point
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told CBS News in an interview published Tuesday that its facilities had been “heavily and seriously damaged,” but that “no one exactly knows that transpired at Fordow.”
The strikes followed several rounds of talks between Washington and Tehran officials over a period of months toward a new nuclear deal. Araghchi told CBS “the doors of diplomacy will never slam shut,” with the U.S.
As Iran was bombarded for nearly two weeks, it fired more than 550 ballistic missiles at Israel in retaliation, killing 28 people.
Iran has said the Israeli attacks killed 935 “Iranian citizens,” including 38 children and 102 women. However, Iran has a long history of offering lower death counts around unrest over political considerations.
The Washington-based Human Rights Activists group, which has provided detailed casualty figures from multiple rounds of unrest in Iran, has put the death toll at 1,190 people killed, including 436 civilians and 435 security force members. The attacks wounded another 4,475 people, the group said.
