Nuclear
Iran suspends its cooperation with the IAEA
The Iranian president promulgated on Wednesday the suspension of cooperation with the AIEA. A “disturbing” decision, according to the UN.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on June 3, 2025 in Tehran.
AFP
The UN deemed “worrying” Iran’s decision on Wednesday to suspend its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (AIEA) after Israeli and American bombings against its nuclear sites.
On June 25, in the aftermath of the ceasefire imposed by Donald Trump after 12 days of war between Iran and Israel, the Iranian Parliament had voted massively a bill suspending cooperation with this UN agency responsible for nuclear security, against which Tehran multiplied the accusations.
The text entered into force on Wednesday after being promulgated by the Iranian president, Massoud Pezeshkian. “We have seen the official decision, which is obviously worrying,” reacted the UN spokesman Stéphane Dujarric.
The State Department described it as “unacceptable”, regretting that “Iran has chosen to suspend its cooperation with the IAEA at a time when it has the possibility of reverse and choosing the path of peace and prosperity”.
Israel’s anger
Iran’s decision has caused the anger of Israel, its enemy since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, including the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Gideon Saar, called on the world to “use all means at its disposal to end the Iranian nuclear ambitions”.
He called Germany, France and the United Kingdom, the three European countries with China and the United States of the 2015 Iranian nuclear agreement, to “restore all sanctions against Iran”, “now”.
This agreement had become deciduous after the unilateral withdrawal of the United States in 2018 and Tehran then began to get rid of its obligations. Berlin described the Iranian decision as “disastrous signal”.
Affirming that Iran was close to making nuclear weapons, Israel launched a massive attack on this country on June 13, hitting hundreds of nuclear and military sites. Iran, which denies wanting to acquire the atomic bomb but defends its right to enrich uranium for civilian purposes, retaliated with missile and drone fire in Israel.
Israeli attacks left at least 935 dead in Iran, according to an official assessment. In Israel, 28 people were killed by Iranian fire, the authorities said.
The question of enrichment
The law promulgated on Wednesday aims to “ensure full support for Iran, and” in particular the enrichment of uranium “under the Treaty of Non -Proliferation (TNP), according to Iranian media.
The question of enrichment is at the heart of disagreements between Iran and the United States, which had engaged in April indirect talks, interrupted by the war.
Iran joined in 1970 to the TNP, which guarantees the peaceful use of atomic energy, but began to prepare the ground for a possible withdrawal during the Israeli offensive which “brought an irreparable blow” to this non-proliferation pact, according to the Iranian ambassador to Vienna, Reza Najafi.
The director general of the IAEA, Rafael Grossi, had stressed on June 26 that Iran’s cooperation with this agency was “a legal obligation”, provided that Iran remains a signatory country “of the TNP.
The law does not specify what concrete measures could lead to the suspension of cooperation with the IAEA, whose inspectors have not had access to Iranian uranium stocks since June 10.
“Security” inspectors
The Iranian ambassador to the UN, Amir Saeid Iravani, said on Sunday on the American channel CBS that inspectors were “safe” in Iran but that “their activities were suspended”.
Iranian officials had strongly denounced a “silence” of the IAEA in the face of Israeli and American bombings on Iranian nuclear sites. Tehran had also criticized the agency for a resolution adopted on June 12, on the eve of the first Israeli strikes, accusing Iran of non -compliance with its obligations in the nuclear field.
Iran has also rejected a Grosse Rafael request to visit its bombed nuclear installations, in order to be able to establish what happened to its stock of uranium enriched at a level close to the design threshold of an atomic bomb.
Rafael Grossi estimated that Iran had technical capacities to start enriching uranium in “a few months” again. On June 27, the head of Iranian diplomacy, Abbas Araghchi, denounced the “malicious intentions” of the head of the AIAA.
In support of the Israeli offensive, US President Donald Trump, had sent bombardiers on the night of June 21 to 22, hitting the underground site of Fordo uranium, south of Tehran, and nuclear installations in Ispahan and Natanz, in the center of Iran.
The extent of damage suffered by these installations remains uncertain. After Donald Trump said at the end of June that the Iranian nuclear program had been “destroyed” and delayed for “decades”, the American press, citing a confidential report by an American intelligence agency had evaluated this period at only a few months. The Pentagon estimated him on Wednesday at around “two years”, invoking an evaluation “of the ministry’s intelligence” of the defense
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