(United Nations) Iran closed its nuclear facilities on Sunday, the day of its attack on Israel, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, said on Monday.
During a press conference on the sidelines of a UN Security Council meeting on the Ukrainian Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, Grossi was asked about the possibility of an Israeli retaliatory strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. .
“We are still concerned about this possibility,” replied the IAEA chief.
“What I can tell you is that our inspectors in Iran were informed by the Iranian government that yesterday (Sunday, Editor’s note), all the nuclear facilities that we inspect every day would remain closed for security reasons,” he added.
According to him, the Iranian facilities were to reopen on Monday. “I have decided not to let the inspectors return until the situation is completely calm. We will resume tomorrow” (Tuesday, Editor’s note), he explained.
This closure “had no impact on our inspection activities. But of course, we always call for the greatest restraint,” he continued.
In 1981, Israel bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, despite opposition from Washington. Israel also admitted, in 2018, to having launched a top-secret air raid eleven years earlier against a nuclear reactor in eastern Syria.
The Israeli secret services are also accused by Tehran of having assassinated two Iranian nuclear physicists in 2010, and of having kidnapped another the previous year.
Also in 2010, a very sophisticated cyberattack via the Stuxnet virus, attributed by Tehran to Israel and the United States, hit the Iranian nuclear program, leading to a series of breakdowns in its fleet of centrifuges used for uranium enrichment. .
Israel accuses Iran – which denies it – of wanting to acquire an atomic bomb and says it is seeking by all means to prevent it.