Iran's president orders suspension of co-operation with UN nuclear watchdog
Iran has limited the UN watchdog's inspections in the past as a pressure tactic in negotiating with the West, although Tehran has denied there are any immediate plans to resume talks with the US which had been upended by the 12-day Iran-Israel war.
Iranian state television announced Mr Pezeshkian's order, which followed a law passed by Iran's parliament to suspend co-operation. The bill had already received the approval of Iran's constitutional watchdog, the Guardian Council, on Thursday, and is likely to have the support of the country's Supreme National Security Council, which Mr Pezeshkian chairs.
'The government is mandated to immediately suspend all co-operation with the International Atomic Energy Agency under the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons and its related Safeguards Agreement,' state television quoted the bill as saying.
'This suspension will remain in effect until certain conditions are met, including the guaranteed security of nuclear facilities and scientists.'
The Vienna-based IAEA has monitored Iran's nuclear programme for years.
It is not known how Tehran will implement the suspension. Under Iran's theocractic government, there is room for the council to implement the bill as it sees fit, which means everything legislators asked for might not be done.
However, the move stops short of what experts feared the most. They had been concerned that Tehran, in response to the war, could fully end its co-operation with the IAEA, abandon the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and rush towards creating a bomb.
Under the treaty, countries agree not to build or obtain nuclear weapons and allow the IAEA to conduct inspections to verify authorities have correctly declared their programmes.
Tehran's 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, negotiated under then US president Barack Obama, allowed Iran to enrich uranium to 3.67% — enough to fuel a nuclear power plant, but far below the threshold of 90% needed for weapons-grade uranium.
It also drastically reduced Iran's stockpile of uranium, limited its use of centrifuges and relied on the IAEA to oversee Tehran's compliance through additional oversight. The IAEA served as the main assessor of Iran's commitment to the deal.
But Donald Trump, in his first term as president in 2018, unilaterally withdrew Washington from the accord, insisting it was not tough enough and did not address Iran's missile programme or its support for militant groups in the wider Middle East.
That set in motion years of tensions, including attacks at sea and on land.
Iran had been enriching up to 60%, a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels. It also has enough of a stockpile to build multiple nuclear bombs.
Iran has long insisted its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes, but the IAEA, western intelligence agencies and others say Tehran had an organised weapons programme until 2003.
Israeli air strikes, which began on June 13, decimated the upper ranks of Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guard and targeted its arsenal of ballistic missiles. The strikes also hit Iran's nuclear sites, which Israel claimed put Tehran within reach of a nuclear weapon.
Iran has said the Israeli attacks killed 935 'Iranian citizens', including 38 children and 102 women. However, Tehran has a long history of offering lower death counts around unrest over political considerations.
The Washington-based Human Rights Activists group, which has provided detailed casualty figures from multiple rounds of unrest in Iran, put the death toll at 1,190 people, including 436 civilians and 435 security force members. The attacks wounded another 4,475 people, the group said.
Meanwhile, it appears that Iranian officials are assessing the damage done by the American strikes on the three nuclear sites on June 22, including those at Fordo, a site built under a mountain about 60 miles south west of Tehran.
Satellite images from Planet Labs PBC analysed by the Associated Press show Iranian officials at Fordo on Monday apparently examining the damage caused by American bunker-buster bombs.
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
The Gaza discourse has been Vylanised – but that diversionary strategy just doesn't work any more
If you are in the business of anointing monsters, you can see why your eyes would light up at a punk act called Bob Vylan. Until last weekend, sure, it might have been a tough sell to proclaim them as an avatar for Britain's revolting youth: prominent though they might be on the UK's punk scene, they had about about 220,000 monthly listeners on Spotify – a mere 1,000,000 away from a place in the top 10,000. But then, at Glastonbury, they made the most powerful possible case for broad media attention: they said something controversial about Israel's assault on Gaza, and opened up a chance to have a go at the BBC. And so the following morning, on the front page of the Mail on Sunday: 'NOW ARREST PUNK BAND WHO LED 'DEATH TO ISRAELIS' CHANTS AT GLASTONBURY.' Pascal Robinson-Foster, aka Bobby Vylan, had started a round of 'antisemitic chanting' that was broadcast live on the corporation's coverage of the festival, the story explained. Keir Starmer called it 'appalling hate speech'. The calls for the band members' arrest were quickly picked up, and before long the Conservatives were suggesting that the BBC should be prosecuted as well. On Monday, the story splashed in the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Express. In fact, Robinson-Foster hadn't chanted 'Death to Israelis', but 'Death to the IDF', a sharply different proposition, and one focused on the military machine attacking Gaza, the Israeli Defense Forces, rather than Israeli civilians. Nonetheless, the Mail on Sunday's headline elision stuck. In much of the coverage, the idea that the chant was inherently antisemitic wasn't even a question. The assertion was barely explained in any of the front page stories; the BBC and even Glastonbury's Emily Eavis went along with it too. If you were looking for a rationale, the closest you got came from Stephen Pollard in the Mail on Sunday: after comparing the scene to the Nuremberg rallies, he added that 'what they meant – because the IDF is the army of the world's only Jewish state – was 'Death, death to the Jews''. Later, Andrew Neil went further: 'I was going to say that they sometimes seem to have more in common with the Nuremberg rally,' he mused. 'But even the Nazis didn't say 'death to the Jews'.' Meanwhile, Yvette Cooper has ordered that Palestine Action should be banned as a terrorist group for its targeting of buildings and businesses in opposition to Israel's actions in Gaza, even though it has no agenda for violence – and after a last-minute legal challenge to the proscription failed on Friday, supporting them is now a criminal offence. In that environment, any uncertainty about the Bob Vylan story would plainly be treated as apologism for hate speech, or worse, and so there wasn't a lot of it about. In truth, though, a lot of people might have been uncertain. The IDF as metonym for any Jew is not a typical trope in the extremist's lexicon, and the circumstances of the Israeli military's assault on Gaza are the obvious, and urgent, locus of the chant's intended force. Nonetheless, Avon and Somerset police have now opened a criminal investigation. There are, to be sure, cogent objections to raise. Robinson-Foster described a record label boss as a 'Zionist', and while he noted that the executive 'would speak very strongly about his support for Israel', it is reasonable to accuse him of playing into a familiar antisemitic trope, particularly about the music industry. Meanwhile, some Jewish people already alert to a rise in racist hostility towards them may well have felt alarmed by the sight of a crowd chanting against the Israeli army. Sensible people will come to a range of conclusions about those points – but there has been no space for that discussion, because the IDF apparently represents Jewish people everywhere, and everything else gets lost in the shuffle. The death toll in Gaza now stands at more than 57,000, according to figures from the Gaza ministry of health; a robust independent survey recently put the count at almost 84,000. Israeli ministers and officials have given weight to allegations that a genocide is under way with assertions that starving two million Palestinians to death might be 'justified and moral' and descriptions of a forced 'deportation plan'. The amount of aid going into the territory remains a fraction of what is needed. At least 400 Palestinians have been killed recently in incidents involving the IDF while approaching food distribution centres; Haaretz reported that soldiers were ordered to fire on them deliberately, a claim denied by Israel as 'vicious lies'. Meanwhile, in the UK, the only adjacent story deemed worthy of front page attention is the conduct of an obscure punk-rap group from Ipswich. On 17 June, at least 59 Palestinians were killed after the IDF fired on a crowd waiting for flour trucks near Khan Younis. The next day's Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Sun and Daily Express featured no coverage of that story at all. Perhaps they would have done if the BBC had broadcast it live. It would be understandable, then, to conclude that the obsession with Bob Vylan – and Kneecap, and Palestine Action – matters mainly for its diversionary force. But there is something more at work here. It isn't just that people are angry that the catastrophe in Gaza isn't being given due attention: it is that their encounters with observable reality are being flatly denied. The choice framed by these stories is between being an anti-racist, or even an anti-terrorist, and being horrified by the slaughter of thousands of brown civilians in a military siege. For anyone who routinely sees videos of the aftermath of Israeli violence against civilians in their social media feeds, this is enough to make you feel crazy. Across the UK and the US, there is increasing evidence that people who object to what we might call the Vylanising of the Gaza discourse are finding their voice. In the general election last year, Labour lost five seats to pro-Gaza candidates, and forfeited about a third of its vote in some Muslim majority areas. In New York, Zohran Mamdani won an underdog victory in the Democratic mayoral primary despite attempts to caricature him as an advocate of 'jihad'. Some 55% of the British public opposes Israel's military campaign in Gaza, and 45% view Israel's actions as genocidal; less than half of Americans are now more sympathetic to Israel than to Palestinians, and almost 60% of Democrats are now more supportive of Palestinians. Among people under 40, those numbers only go up. Those people have been told that Gaza protests are hate marches; they can see it's not true. They have been told that US campus protesters are largely motivated by antisemitism; they can see it's not true. They have been told that Palestine Action is a terrorist organisation because it spray painted military aircraft; they can see it's not true. They have been repeatedly told, by Benjamin Netanyahu, that opposition to Israel's war is antisemitic; they can see it's not true. They have been told that the British government finds Israel's actions 'intolerable'; they can see it's not true. Now they are being told that opposing the IDF is antisemitic, that the Glastonbury crowd is more virulent than the one at Nuremberg, and that direct action is a form of terrorism. They can see all that's not true, either, and however far their view is from the front pages, they know that they are far from alone. Archie Bland is the editor of the Guardian's First Edition newsletter Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
Iran's devastation has hardened hearts towards the west – even for those with no love of the state
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But what may be damaged beyond repair – perhaps irredeemably so – is the moral fabric on which Europe stands to preach to others. The double standards. The hypocrisy. The injustice of it all. The imperial mindset – still visibly alive and well – now casts a long shadow over how Europe is perceived. Not just for Iranians, I suspect, but for many people across the global south. These are hard times to live through. Whether the Islamic republic survives this moment, strikes a deal, or continues down its current path of retaliation, I do not know. But what is sure is that whoever governs Iran in the future will not forget what happened here. Hossein Hamdieh holds a joint PhD in Geography and Anthropology from Humboldt University of Berlin and King's College London. He is currently based in Tehran, where he works as a social researcher Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
The Independent
2 hours ago
- The Independent
The destruction of Iran's nuclear programmes opens the door to a better future for citizens like me
The dismantling of the Ayatollah's dangerous nuclear sites is a defining moment for millions of us ordinary Iranians who have dared to dream that one day the country's repressive theocratic regime may fall. For the first time, I have hope in my heart. Twenty-eight years ago, I fled Iran to save my life and find freedom in the UK. I was arrested twice in Iran due to my outspoken opposition to the regime. Following my second arrest, I learned that it was planning to eliminate me. I had no choice but to leave. You can never truly escape a regime of this nature, though. Iran's tentacles now threaten us here, with its active promotion of extremism, and MI5 have revealed that they have foiled more than 20 terror plots from Iran's brutal Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps since 2022. It has heavily invested in British charities, mosques and communities in order to destroy the very foundations of what we stand for and destroy us from within. Alert to the emerging threat, two and a half years ago, I made the difficult decision to sacrifice the very freedom I once sought for myself. I have lived on the streets ever since, away from my wife, the Conservative councillor Mattie Heaven, my home, and my family, risking my life every day that I am in the peace camp opposite the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Repeatedly subject to verbal and physical attacks by agents of the IRGC freely acting on British soil, I treat every day as my last. I've been threatened with beheading, with a large knife later discovered on one of the assailants by the police. A fatwa has even been issued against me. The destruction of Iran's nuclear programmes opens the door to a better future for the citizens of Iran. This historic people have suffered for 47 long years. The butchers of Tehran have perpetrated grisly human rights abuses, with public hangings a daily horror and women beaten for the 'crime' of not wearing a hijab 'correctly.' Is it any surprise that 80 per cent of the Iranian public oppose the Iranian regime? Shaken to its core, the regime has again turned to what it knows best. More than 700 people have been arrested over the last two weeks on spurious claims that they aided Israel, including rabbis and other senior Jewish leaders. Executions are also on the rise again. It is nothing more than a desperate attempt to silence critics and forestall an uprising against the teetering regime. The internet was taken down for days on end. Human rights groups are sounding the alarm over unfair trials and forced confessions. Journalists and their families have been threatened, including those from the BBC. Internet access continues to be restricted. We can ill afford not to prepare for the regime's impending collapse. The arduous work must be completed now to ensure Iran's next chapter is not written in blood or chaos, but in law, democracy, and the will of the people. Iran's once great civil society has been mercilessly eroded by the regime and needs the support of the international community and the Iranian diaspora to usher in a new Iran. It is why the Iranian Front for the Revival of Law and National Sovereignty, which I recently launched in the European Parliament with cross-party support, is working flat out to produce the necessary legal framework to stabilise the country, protect citizens and pave the way for a freely elected Constituent Assembly. It is inspiring that representatives of Iran's richly diverse ethnic, religious and political groups are engaging with the initiative, as well as many of those who were forced into exile. There can be no going back to the status quo, which has crushed the Iranian people and caused untold suffering throughout the region, including the deaths of British soldiers and British citizens wasting away in Iran's grim jails. The UK Government must embrace this historic moment and join our groundbreaking efforts. After all, the advancement of democracy and equality in an unstable world is good for the people of Britain. It will also eradicate Iran's deep role in people smuggling and drug trafficking, which are destabilising British society. The challenges of regime change are significant, but they are incomparable to the vast opportunities it would bring not only for the people of Iran but for the security, stability, and prosperity of the entire world. A free, democratic Iran would be a turning point for the region and a beacon of hope for global peace. The Iranian people have shown remarkable resilience and it is our duty to prepare the ground for a better future – one of democracy, equality and freedom.
