Iran could recover some uranium, but Israel is watching, Israeli official says
Washington – Israel thinks that at least part of Iran’s highly enriched uranium was buried under the Iranian installation of Isfahan by the United States and not destroyed or moved in advance, a senior Israeli government in Washington said on Wednesday. But he is indeed inaccessible, said the manager, because Israel looks at, and if he believes that Iran tries to dig up the equipment, he will not hesitate to carry out new strikes.
Asked about the conclusion of Israel concerning Uranium in Isfahan, the spokesperson for the White House, Anna Kelly, told NBC News in a statement: “As President Trump said on several occasions, Operation Midnight Hammer has completely erased the nuclear installations of Iran. The whole world is safer thanks to its decisive leadership.”
In a long briefing with journalists on Wednesday evening, the senior head of the Israeli government said that Israel had decided to attack the Iranian nuclear installations because of the intelligence he had that Tehran had quickly and secretly started with the armament of his uranium enriched after the targeted assassination of Israel of Hezbollah Hassan Nasralaha in September.
The official said that Israel had shared the information with President Donald Trump but was preparing to strike with or without green light or participation of the United States and that US support was not a condition for Israel’s decision to hit Iran’s nuclear installations.
The official would not specify the source of intelligence.
Iran denies that it wishes to build a nuclear weapon. In an interview with NBC News one day before the United States hit, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said each country had the right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.
“It is an achievement of our own scientists. It is a question of national pride and dignity,” he said.
Asked about the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, having testified before the Congress in March, the US intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran does not build a nuclear weapon and that the supreme chief Khamenei did not authorize the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003”, the Israeli official rejected the question, considering the evaluation as non-serious.
According to the official, Israel believes that the Iranian nuclear program has now been set up up to two years.
A first evaluation of the US Defense Intelligence Agency disclosed at the end of last month revealed that the United States on Isfahan and two other sites could not withdraw the program for several months.
The question of how Iran’s nuclear program has damaged – as well as to what extent its calendar towards the construction of a nuclear weapon if ever decided to do so has been delayed – was politically loaded. Trump and his administration denounced the leakage of the DIA assessment and the points of sale which reported it for the first time.
The day after the first evaluation of the DIA assessment, CIA director John Ratcliffe said in a statement that “a set of credible information” said the program was “seriously damaged”.
“This includes new information from a historically reliable source / method specifies that several key Iranian nuclear installations have been destroyed and should be rebuilt over the years,” he said.
