by BEHROOZ GHAMARI TABRIZI
On June 12, 2025, for the first time after more than twenty years, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board of governors passed a resolution declaring that Tehran was breaching its non-proliferation obligations. The day after, on June 13, Israeli warplanes began a campaign of bombing Tehran and other major Iranian cities. With the help of their proxies inside the country, they assassinated top military commanders, killed leading nuclear scientists at their residence along with their families, bombed the cabinet meeting in Tehran, wounding the President, indiscriminately shelled urban residential areas, and even targeted Evin prison where most political prisoners are incarcerated. The U.S. offered intelligence, refueled their jetfighters in mid-air, and finally entered the war directly by bombing the Iranian nuclear enrichment sites with bunker buster weapons.
This unprovoked Israeli attack happened in the midst of seemingly constructive negotiations between Iran and the U.S. in Rome and Muscat. The Friday the 13th attack happened just before the two countries were to meet on Sunday the 15th to finalize a framework for further agreements on the Iranian enrichment program. In all close to 1000 people were killed in the Israeli attacks, thousands injured, and hundreds of families lost their homes.
There is no solid evidence whether the IAEA board coordinated the release of their report with the Israelis. But the suspicious choreography of the timing of the report’s release with the Israeli attacks affords credibility to the Islamic Republic’s claims that some of the IAEA inspectors spied for Israel. In its report, the IAEA excavated questions from twenty years earlier about highly enriched particles found in three Iranian sites. The case for the Iranian noncompliance is primarily based on the Agency’s conclusion “that these undeclared locations were part of an undeclared, structured programme carried out by Iran until the early 2000s, and that some of these activities used undeclared nuclear material” (my emphasis). Obfuscated in the report was the fact that the IAES has found no evidence of any weaponization program or military component in the Iranian nuclear activities. It was only a few days after the attacks that the IAEA’s Director General, Rafael Grossi, reiterated that “Iran has not been actively pursuing a nuclear weapon since 2003.”
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