Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said Sunday that the Isfahan strike “can’t have an effect on the will and intent of our experts for peaceful nuclear progress,” the semiofficial Tasnim news agency reported.
While Iran insists it is developing nuclear capabilities for peaceful purposes, the United Nation’s top nuclear official, Rafael Mariano Grossi, told European lawmakers last week that Tehran had enriched enough uranium to potentially build “several” nuclear weapons.
Iran has more highly enriched uranium than it did during years of tensions that preceded the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, according to Grossi of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who stressed that despite its growing capabilities, Iran had not yet built a nuclear weapon.
Ali Fathollah-Nejad, an Iran expert with the American University of Beirut, said he expected Israel’s alleged “sabotage of Iran’s military and nuclear programs” to intensify given the “dim” chance of reviving the 2016 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action intended to contain the development of Iran’s nuclear program.
Among the factors contributing to the stalemate over any revival of the nuclear deal, he said, was “the higher political costs in the West” given the protests in Iran against clerical rule, sparked in mid-September by the death of Mahsa Amini, 22, while in the custody of the country’s so-called morality police.
The Biden administration has endorsed the protest movement and has put Iranian officials under sanctions for their role in the crackdown, in which authorities have killed more than 500 people, executed at least four and arrested some 20,000 others, according to the activist news agency HRANA.
The unrest in Iran comes amid the return to office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu through a coalition that includes extreme-right Jewish nationalists and settler activists and spiraling violence between Israelis and Palestinians.
Israel, under Netanyahu’s direction for most of the last decade, is believed to have carried out a series of clandestine strikes inside Iran, though it rarely makes public comments.
In May, an engineer was killed and another person injured in what Tasnim described as an “accident” at the Parchin military complex southeast of the capital Tehran. The year before, an attack allegedly damaged centrifuges at the underground Natanz nuclear facility near Isfahan. Among the more brazen attacks attributed to Israel was the 2020 assassination of nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in a daytime assault on his convoy of cars.
Saturday’s strike signals that “Bibi is back,” referring to Netanyahu, “and that perhaps the U.S. is providing Israel with greater operating space to target Iran given the deadlock over nuclear talks, in addition to the West’s frustrations with Iran over its military support of Russia during the Ukraine war,” Ellie Geranmayeh, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said in an email.
