IAEA director: False to say IDF attacked an Iranian nuke site

IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi on Wednesday contradicted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s claim that Israel struck a nuclear site in Iran as part of its 20 attacks on the country on October 26.

Netanyahu said one of the sites attacked was connected to Iran’s nuclear program, with leaks that he was referring to the site at Parchin, where the Islamic Republic had a nuclear site in the early 2000s, which it eventually moved and covered up.

Grossi directly said that Parchin has had no nuclear activity in a long time while acknowledging that it may have in the distant past.

Supporting Grossi’s claim against Netanyahu’s, multiple briefings by Israeli defense officials regarding the October 26 attack never mentioned anything about a strike on a nuclear facility, instead always explaining why Israel had avoided such targets.

More specifically, Grossi responded to the question about Netanyahu’s claim, “if you’re referring to the area of Parchin. We do not consider this a nuclear facility. We don’t have any information that would confirm the presence of nuclear material there… it could have been involved in the past in some activities perhaps, but not even that building,” which Israel struck.

Non-recognition

“I leave to those military decision-makers to judge and characterize places, but as far as the IAEA is concerned, we don’t see it as a nuclear facility.”

Despite Grossi’s claim and the IDF leaving a current nuclear site off their list of what was attacked, a spokesman for Netanyahu doubled down on the claim that a nuclear site was attacked.

Another source in the defense establishment, which often comments on such issues, declined to comment, leaving some mystery and the possibility of some unknown tricky nuances regarding the whole episode. 

The IDF struck Iran on October 26 after Tehran massively attacked the Jewish state on October 1 with over 180 ballistic missiles.

Earlier on Wednesday, Grossi recommended to the IAEA Board of Governors not to condemn Iran this coming Friday following the Islamic Republic’s acceptance of a compromise offer, which it turns out he personally suggested. 

Iran has offered to freeze its 60% uranium enrichment process and to allow four new IAEA inspectors into the country if the Board forgoes condemning it this week.

Grossi is the executive officer who runs the daily operations of the IAEA nuclear inspections and meets directly with heads of state and foreign ministers, as he did in Tehran last week.

The IAEA Board is a group of diplomats from 35 countries who generally meet quarterly, make strategic policy decisions, and give directives to Grossi, who then decides how to implement the directives.

In addition, the IAEA General Conference meets annually and has a broader supervisory role over the Board and Grossi.

The Board is not bound by recommendations and, at press time, was expected to reject his suggestion, viewing Tehran’s compromise as too little too late.

It is also possible, according to Gorssi, that Tehran might be willing to offer compromises even after a condemnation if there is little in terms of concrete penalties.

One penalty that has been discussed is telling Grossi to draft a more comprehensive report on Iran’s nuclear violations than has been done in recent years.

To date, Iran has already enriched around 180 kilograms of uranium up to the 60% level, only one level away from the 90% weaponized level. 

Depending on whether one estimates a nuclear weapon as possible from 25 or 40 kilograms (there are different views and also different size bombs), this means that the Islamic Republic already has enough enriched uranium if it decides to break out into a nuclear weapon, to develop between four and seven weapons.

In fact, this amount of uranium is likely what Iran planned to enrich under the clandestine AMAD military nuclear program it ran from 1999-2003, and which Mossad later exposed in 2018 when it seized Iran’s nuclear secrets from a warehouse in Shirobad, Tehran.

Accordingly, its critics at the IAEA and beyond would say that the compromise is worthless, absent a commitment also to significantly reduce the already enriched 60% uranium stock.

Further, the Islamic Republic’s offer to return four nuclear inspectors out of eight that it previously expelled, and its condition that none of the four be among the group of eight, is also viewed as a bad faith compromise by many IAEA critics of Iran.

The eight inspectors were expelled after they caught Iran enriching uranium up to 84% in one location in February 2023, the most significant violation of the nuclear limits on Iran to date.

Even Grossi admitted that Iran continues to avoid questions about illicit nuclear material, which the Mossad and later the IAEA found at the Turquzabad nuclear site in 2018, and that it has cut off the IAEA’s continuity of knowledge in a variety of areas of the status of the nuclear program.

Grossi did note that he visited both the critical Fordow and Natanz nuclear facilities while in Iran last week.

In the broader context, the IAEA Board is frustrated that Iran ignored the condemnation against it this past June and that time is running out for diplomacy before the global sanctions “snapback” mechanism – which allows any member of the 2015 nuclear deal to unilaterally snapback all global sanctions on Tehran – expires around October 2025.

Once the snapback expires, what remains of the 2015 nuclear deal – which has been on life support since around 2018-2019 when the first Trump administration pulled out of the deal after Mossad exposed Iran’s nuclear cover-up and when Tehran responded with more openly violating the deal – will essentially be gone.

This could leave Iran to break out to a nuclear weapon even more freely or put greater pressure on Israel or the US to carry out a wide strike against Tehran’s nuclear program.