Iran-Israel latest: Trump compares US strikes on nuclear sites to Hiroshima atomic bombing – UK Times

Iran’s parliament has agreed to fast-track a proposal that would effectively end co-operation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN watchdog.

Parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf criticised the IAEA for having “refused to even pretend to condemn the attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities” by the United States.

“For this reason, the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran will suspend co-operation with the IAEA until security of nuclear facilities is ensured, and Iran’s peaceful nuclear programme will move forward at a faster pace,” Mr Qalibaf told politicians.

IAEA director-general Rafael Grossi said he had written to Iran to discuss resuming inspections of their nuclear facilities.

“We need to return,” he said.

Iran’s battered theocracy and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei must regroup and rebuild in a changed landscape:

Israel’s prime minister claims Iran’s nuclear programme has been set back “many years” following the US attack on the sites.

The Israel Atomic Energy Commission said: “The devastating US strike on Fordow destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility inoperable.

“We assess that the American strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, combined with Israeli strikes on other elements of Iran’s military nuclear program, has set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years.

The statement continued: “The achievement can continue indefinitely if Iran does not get access to nuclear material.”

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei told Al Jazeera that there was significant damage.

“Our nuclear installations have been badly damaged, that’s for sure,” he said.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi informed UN nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi on the day Israel launched its military campaign against Iran that Tehran would “adopt special measures to protect our nuclear equipment and materials”.

American satellite imagery firm Maxar Technologies said its satellites photographed trucks and bulldozers at the Fordo site beginning on June 19, three days before the Americans struck.

Subsequent imagery “revealed that the tunnel entrances into the underground complex had been sealed off with dirt prior to the US airstrikes”, said Stephen Wood, senior director.

Some experts say those trucks could also have been used to move out Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile.

“It is plausible that Iran moved the material enriched to 60% out of Fordo and loaded it on a truck,” said Eric Brewer, a former US intelligence analyst, now deputy vice president at the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

Iran could also have moved other equipment, including centrifuges, he said, noting that while enriched uranium stored in fortified canisters is relatively easy to transport, delicate centrifuges are more challenging to move.

Kelsey Davenport, of the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan policy center, said that if Iran had already diverted its centrifuges, it could “build a covert enrichment facility with a small footprint and inject the 60% gas into those centrifuges and quickly enrich to weapons grade levels”.

The head of the CIA has confirmed that “credible intelligence” suggests Iran’s nuclear programme was severely damaged by US strikes on it on Sunday.

John Ratcliffe said several key nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years.

“This includes new intelligence from a historically reliable and accurate source/method that several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years,” he said in a statement.

A leaked preliminary intelligence assessment reportedly found that the US military strikes did not destroy the country’s nuclear programme, but Donald Trump insisted they did.

Nuclear enrichment and weaponisation by Iran are red lines for the United States, president Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff has said, adding that he was hopeful for a comprehensive peace agreement with Tehran.

“We can’t have weaponisation,” he told CNBC. “That will destabilise the entire region. Everyone will then need a bomb and we just can’t have that.”

In a rare video released by Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, its chief David Barnea thanked the CIA for being a key partner, and his own agents for work over months and years to achieve what was “unimaginable at first”.

“Thanks to accurate intelligence, advanced technologies and operational capabilities beyond imagination, we helped the Air Force strike the Iranian nuclear project, establish aerial superiority in Iranian skies and reduce the missile threat,” the agency wrote on social media.