International Atomic Energy Agency: Iran in breach of non-proliferation commitments
IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi told the U.N. body's board that Iran had obstructed efforts to verify the origin of uranium traces found at three undeclared facilities and tried to "sanitize" some of the sites. File Photo by Keizo Mori/UPI | License Photo
June 12 (UPI) -- The U.N. nuclear energy watchdog ruled Thursday that Iran was in breach of its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty obligations by failing to come clean about undeclared nuclear material and activities at multiple sites.
A meeting of the 35-member-nation board of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna voted 19-3 in a favor of the resolution, the first against Iran in 20 years, amid heightened tension over its nculear program and fears an pre-emptive military strike by Israel could be imminent.
Russia, China and Burkina Faso voted against the U.S., British, French and German-sponsored resolution, 11 countries abstained and two did not take part at all.
The vote came after IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi, in a briefing on the body's quarterly report, told the board that Iran had not been cooperating and had sufficient 60% enriched uranium to build nine nuclear warheads.
He said the IAEA had been seeking answers from Tehran ever since inspectors found man-made uranium particles at three undeclared locations in 2019 and 2020, including via a series of high-level meetings and consultations that he said he had been personally involved in.
"We have been seeking explanations and clarifications from Iran for the presence of these uranium particles. Unfortunately, Iran has repeatedly either not answered or not provided technically credible answers to the agency's questions. It has also sought to sanitize the locations, which has impeded agency verification activities," Grossi said.
The decision prompted a strong reaction from Tehran, which issued a statement criticizing what it called a "political" move that placed the IAEA's credibility and stature in doubt and that it would bring forward "a new [uranium] enrichment center in a secure location" and update first generation centrifuges at another site.
Prior to the vote it threatened to quit the 1970 NPT, which Tehran has signed but failed to ratify the part that authorizes international inspection teams access to remote regions of Iran where they have reason to believe illicit nuclear development projects may be underway.
On Wednesday, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi warned the so-called E3 [Britain, France and Germany] against punishing Iran for its own failures with regard to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action under which the United States, E3, Russia and China agreed to lift some sanctions in return for Iran reining in its nuclear program.
"The E3 have had seven years to implement their JCPOA commitments. They have utterly failed, either by design or ineptitude. Instead of displaying remorse or a desire to facilitate diplomacy, the E3 is today promoting confrontation through the absurd demand that Iran must be punished for exercising its right under the JCPOA to respond to non-performance by its counterparts," he wrote on X.
"As I have warned: Another major strategic mistake by the E3 will compel Iran to react strongly. Blame will lie solely and fully with malign actors who shatter their own relevance."
A joint statement issued by the Foreign Office in London said Britain, France, Germany, and United States welcomed the action by the IAEA.
"The board's collective action upholds the integrity of the IAEA safeguards system and the broader nuclear nonproliferation regime: states will be held to account if they do not live up to their obligations.
"The action creates an opportunity Iran should seize. Iran still has a chance to finally fulfill its obligations, in full candor, and answer the IAEA's crucial, longstanding questions on undeclared nuclear material and activities," said the statement.
However, ongoing U.S.-Iran negotiations mediated by Oman that began in April were apparently unaffected with a sixth round between Araghchi and Steve Witkoff, U.S. President Donald Trump's special envoy, scheduled to go ahead Sunday as planned, according to Omani Foreign Minister Bad Albusaidi.
The negotiations, exactly five years after Trump pulled the United States out of the JCPOA during his first term, are aimed at replacement deal ensuring Iran does not and cannot develop a nuclear weapon in exchange for removing sanctions.
Iran has always denied working toward developing nuclear weapons, insisting its nuclear program is strictly for energy and other peaceful purposes.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
an hour ago
As the UN turns 80, its crucial humanitarian aid work faces a clouded future
KAKUMA, Kenya -- At a refugee camp in northern Kenya, Aujene Cimanimpaye waits as a hot lunch of lentils and sorghum is ladled out for her and her nine children — all born while she has received United Nations assistance since fleeing her violence-wracked home in Congo in 2007. 'We cannot go back home because people are still being killed,' the 41-year-old said at the Kakuma camp, where the U.N. World Food Program and U.N. refugee agency help support more than 300,000 refugees. Her family moved from Nakivale Refugee Settlement in neighboring Uganda three years ago to Kenya, now home to more than a million refugees from dozens of conflict-hit east African countries. A few kilometers (miles) away at the Kalobeyei Refugee Settlement, fellow Congolese refugee Bahati Musaba, a mother of five, said that since 2016, 'U.N. agencies have supported my children's education — we get food and water and even medicine,' as well as cash support from WFP to buy food and other basics. This year, those cash transfers — and many other U.N. aid activities — have stopped, threatening to upend or jeopardize millions of lives. As the U.N. marks its 80th anniversary this month, its humanitarian agencies are facing one of the greatest crises in their history: The biggest funder — the United States — under the Trump administration and other Western donors have slashed international aid spending. Some want to use the money to build up national defense. Some U.N. agencies are increasingly pointing fingers at one another as they battle over a shrinking pool of funding, said a diplomat from a top donor country who spoke on condition of anonymity to comment freely about the funding crisis faced by some U.N. agencies. Such pressures, humanitarian groups say, diminish the pivotal role of the U.N. and its partners in efforts to save millions of lives — by providing tents, food and water to people fleeing unrest in places like Myanmar, Sudan, Syria and Venezuela, or helping stamp out smallpox decades ago. 'It's the most abrupt upheaval of humanitarian work in the U.N. in my 40 years as a humanitarian worker, by far,' said Jan Egeland, a former U.N. humanitarian aid chief who now heads the Norwegian Refugee Council. 'And it will make the gap between exploding needs and contributions to aid work even bigger.' U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has asked the heads of U.N. agencies to find ways to cut 20% of their staffs, and his office in New York has floated sweeping ideas about reform that could vastly reshape the way the United Nations doles out aid. Humanitarian workers often face dangers and go where many others don't — to slums to collect data on emerging viruses or drought-stricken areas to deliver water. The U.N. says 2024 was the deadliest year for humanitarian personnel on record, mainly due to the war in Gaza. In February, it suspended aid operations in the stronghold of Yemen's Houthi rebels, who have detained dozens of U.N. and other aid workers. Proponents say U.N. aid operations have helped millions around the world affected by poverty, illness, conflict, hunger and other troubles. Critics insist many operations have become bloated, replete with bureaucratic perks and a lack of accountability, and are too distant from in-the-field needs. They say postcolonial Western donations have fostered dependency and corruption, which stifles the ability of countries to develop on their own, while often U.N.-backed aid programs that should be time-specific instead linger for many years with no end in sight. In the case of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning WFP and the U.N.'s refugee and migration agencies, the U.S. has represented at least 40% of their total budgets, and Trump administration cuts to roughly $60 billion in U.S. foreign assistance have hit hard. Each U.N. agency has been cutting thousands of jobs and revising aid spending. 'It's too brutal what has happened,' said Egeland, alluding to cuts that have jolted the global aid community. 'However, it has forced us to make priorities ... what I hope is that we will be able to shift more of our resources to the front lines of humanity and have less people sitting in offices talking about the problem.' With the U.N. Security Council's divisions over wars in Ukraine and the Middle East hindering its ability to prevent or end conflict in recent years, humanitarian efforts to vaccinate children against polio or shelter and feed refugees have been a bright spot of U.N. activity. That's dimming now. Aside from the cuts and dangers faced by humanitarian workers, political conflict has at times overshadowed or impeded their work. UNRWA, the aid agency for Palestinian refugees, has delivered an array of services to millions — food, education, jobs and much more — in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan as well as in the West Bank and Gaza since its founding in 1948. Israel claims the agency's schools fan antisemitic and anti-Israel sentiment, which the agency denies. Israel says Hamas siphons off U.N. aid in Gaza to profit from it, while U.N. officials insist most aid gets delivered directly to the needy. 'UNRWA is like one of the foundations of your home. If you remove it, everything falls apart,' said Issa Haj Hassan, 38, after a checkup at a small clinic at the Mar Elias Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. UNRWA covers his diabetes and blood pressure medication, as well as his wife's heart medicine. The United States, Israel's top ally, has stopped contributing to UNRWA; it once provided a third of its funding. Earlier this year, Israel banned the aid group, which has strived to continue its work nonetheless. Ibtisam Salem, a single mother of five in her 50s who shares a small one-room apartment in Beirut with relatives who sleep on the floor, said: 'If it wasn't for UNRWA we would die of starvation. ... They helped build my home, and they give me health care. My children went to their schools.' Especially when it comes to food and hunger, needs worldwide are growing even as funding to address them shrinks. 'This year, we have estimated around 343 million acutely food insecure people,' said Carl Skau, WFP deputy executive director. 'It's a threefold increase if we compare four years ago. And this year, our funding is dropping 40%. So obviously that's an equation that doesn't come together easily.' Billing itself as the world's largest humanitarian organization, WFP has announced plans to cut about a quarter of its 22,000 staff. One question is how the United Nations remains relevant as an aid provider when global cooperation is on the outs, and national self-interest and self-defense are on the upswing. The United Nations is not alone: Many of its aid partners are feeling the pinch. Groups like GAVI, which tries to ensure fair distribution of vaccines around the world, and the Global Fund, which spends billions each year to help battle HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, have been hit by Trump administration cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development. Some private-sector, government-backed groups also are cropping up, including the divisive Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has been providing some food to Palestinians. But violence has erupted as crowds try to reach the distribution sites. No private-sector donor or well-heeled country — China and oil-rich Gulf states are often mentioned by aid groups — have filled the significant gaps from shrinking U.S. and other Western spending. The future of U.N. aid, experts say, will rest where it belongs — with the world body's 193 member countries. 'We need to take that debate back into our countries, into our capitals, because it is there that you either empower the U.N. to act and succeed — or you paralyze it,' said Achim Steiner, administrator of the U.N. Development Program.
an hour ago
The US commemorates 250th anniversary of the 'great American battle,' the Battle of Bunker Hill
NEW YORK -- As the U.S. marks the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, it might take a moment — or more — to remember why. Start with the very name. 'There's something percussive about it: Battle of Bunker Hill,' says prize-winning historian Nathaniel Philbrick, whose 'Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution' was published in 2013. 'What actually happened probably gets hazy for people outside of the Boston area, but it's part of our collective memory and imagination.' 'Few 'ordinary' Americans could tell you that Freeman's Farm, or Germantown, or Guilford Court House were battles,' says Paul Lockhart, a professor of history at Wright University and author of a Bunker Hill book, 'The Whites of Their Eyes," which came out in 2011. "But they can say that Gettysburg, D-Day, and Bunker Hill were battles.' Bunker Hill, Lockhart adds, 'is the great American battle, if there is such a thing.' Much of the world looks to the Battles of Lexington and Concord, fought in Massachusetts on April 19, 1775, as the start of the American Revolution. But Philbrick, Lockhart and others cite Bunker Hill and June 17 as the real beginning, the first time British and rebel forces faced off in sustained conflict over a specific piece of territory. Bunker Hill was an early showcase for two long-running themes in American history — improvisation and how an inspired band of militias could hold their own against an army of professionals. 'It was a horrific bloodletting, and provided the British high command with proof that the Americans were going to be a lot more difficult to subdue than had been hoped,' says the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Rick Atkinson, whose second volume of a planned trilogy on the Revolution, 'The Fate of the Day,' was published in April. The battle was born in part out of error; rebels were seeking to hold off a possible British attack by fortifying Bunker Hill, a 110-foot-high (34-meter-high) peak in Charlestown across the Charles River from British-occupied Boston. But for reasons still unclear, they instead armed a smaller and more vulnerable ridge known as Breed's Hill, 'within cannon shot of Boston,' Philbrick says. "The British felt they had no choice but to attack and seize the American fort.' Abigail Adams, wife of future President John Adams, and son John Quincy Adams, also a future president, were among thousands in the Boston area who looked on from rooftops, steeples and trees as the two sides fought with primal rage. A British officer would write home about the 'shocking carnage' left behind, a sight 'that never will be erased out of my mind 'till the day of my death.' The rebels were often undisciplined and disorganized and they were running out of gunpowder. The battle ended with them in retreat, but not before the British had lost more than 200 soldiers and sustained more than 1,000 casualties, compared to some 450 colonial casualties and the destruction of hundreds of homes, businesses and other buildings in Charlestown. Bunker Hill would become characteristic of so much of the Revolutionary War: a technical defeat that was a victory because the British needed to win decisively and the rebels needed only not to lose decisively. 'Nobody now entertains a doubt but that we are able to cope with the whole force of Great Britain, if we are but willing to exert ourselves,' Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend in early July. 'As our enemies have found we can reason like men, now let us show them we can fight like men also.'
Boston Globe
2 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Diplomatic breakthrough elusive as Israel-Iran war stretches into second week
'Iran is ready to consider diplomacy if aggression ceases and the aggressor is held accountable for its committed crimes,' he told reporters. No date was set for the next round of talks. Advertisement Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel's military operation in Iran would continue 'for as long as it takes' to eliminate what he called the existential threat of Iran's nuclear program and arsenal of ballistic missiles. Israel's top general echoed the warning, saying the Israeli military was ready 'for a prolonged campaign.' But Netanyahu's goal could be out of reach without U.S. help. Iran's underground Fordo uranium enrichment facility is considered to be out of reach to all but America's 'bunker-buster' bombs. Trump said he would put off deciding whether to join Israel's air campaign against Iran for up to two weeks. The war between Israel and Iran erupted June 13, with Israeli airstrikes targeting nuclear and military sites, top generals and nuclear scientists. At least 657 people, including 263 civilians, have been killed in Iran and more than 2,000 wounded, according to a Washington-based Iranian human rights group. Advertisement Iran has retaliated by firing 450 missiles and 1,000 drones at Israel, according to Israeli army estimates. Most have been shot down by Israel's multitiered air defenses, but at least 24 people in Israel have been killed and hundreds wounded. Worries rise over the perils of attacking Iran's nuclear reactors Addressing an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency warned against attacks on Iran's nuclear reactors, particularly its only commercial nuclear power plant in the southern city of Bushehr. 'I want to make it absolutely and completely clear: In case of an attack on the Bushehr nuclear power plant, a direct hit would result in a very high release of radioactivity to the environment,' said Rafael Grossi, chief of the U.N. nuclear watchdog. 'This is the nuclear site in Iran where the consequences could be most serious.' Israel has not targeted Iran's nuclear reactors, instead focusing its strikes on the main uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, centrifuge workshops near Tehran, laboratories in Isfahan and the country's Arak heavy water reactor southwest of the capital. Grossi has warned repeatedly that such sites should not be military targets. After initially reporting no visible damage from Israel's Thursday strikes on the Arak heavy water reactor, the IAEA on Friday said it had assessed 'key buildings at the facility were damaged,' including the distillation unit. The reactor was not operational and contained no nuclear material, so the damage posed no risk of contamination, the watchdog said. Iran previously agreed to limit its uranium enrichment and allow international inspectors access to its nuclear sites under a 2015 deal with the U.S., France, China, Russia, Britain and Germany in exchange for sanctions relief. But after Trump pulled the U.S. unilaterally out of the deal during his first term, Iran began enriching uranium up to 60% — a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90% — and restricting access to its nuclear facilities. Advertisement Iran has long maintained its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, but it is the only non-nuclear-weapon state to enrich uranium up to 60%. Israel is widely believed to be the only Middle Eastern country with a nuclear weapons program but has never acknowledged it. Israel says 'difficult days' ahead Israel said its warplanes hit dozens of military targets across Iran on Friday, including missile-manufacturing facilities, while an Iranian missile hit Israel's northern city of Haifa, sending plumes of smoke billowing over the Mediterranean port and wounding at least 31 people. Iranian state media reported explosions from Israeli strikes in an industrial area of Rasht, along the coast of the Caspian Sea. Israel's military had warned Iranians to evacuate the area around Rasht's Industrial City, southwest of the city's downtown. But with Iran's internet shut off — now for more than 48 hours — it's unclear how many people could see the message. The Israeli military believes it has destroyed most of Iran's ballistic missile launchers, contributing to the steady decline in Iranian attacks. But several of the roughly three dozen missiles that Israel said Iran fired on Friday slipped through the country's aerial defense system, setting off air-raid sirens across the country and sending shrapnel flying into a residential area in the southern city of Beersheba, a frequent target of Iranian missiles where a hospital was hit Thursday. Advertisement
