Media reports emerged indicating that UN inspectors visited a facility Netanyahu fingered as a secret Iranian nuclear site.
By World Israel News Staff
According to a Reuters report on Thursday, inspectors from the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspected the “secret atomic warehouse” in Tehran that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu identified in September 2018 in remarks before the U.N.
According to Netanyahu, 300 tons of nuclear material and associated equipment were being stored at the site in the Iranian capital.
Netanyahu delivered the speech at the U.N. months after Israel announced an operation in which agents surreptitiously entered Iran and removed a “half-ton” of Iranian nuclear documents from a massive archive in a Tehran warehouse.
Israel presented the documents as proof that Iran has continued to pursue nuclear weapons in violation of the 2015 international agreement that prohibited this activity. The agreement brought Iran economic relief from crippling economic sanctions and flooded the Islamic Republic with billions of dollars.
The sanctions had been put in place, and were reinstated by U.S. President Donald Trump in 2018, to stifle Iran’s nuclear ambitions and prevent it from funding the bevy of Islamic terror groups it supports in the region, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
While IAEA officials initially dismissed Israel’s evidence, it appears inspectors from the UN’s nuclear agency this week visited the facility Netanyahu identified.
Specifically, Reuters quoted several diplomats who claimed the IAEA visited the site in Tehran several times last month, adding that tests are currently being performed on samples taken at the location to determine if nuclear materials were housed there. Results are expected in June.
Iran claims the site is nothing more than a carpet-cleaning facility.
While one of the diplomats quoted by Reuters claimed the inspections proved Iran was complying with the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal, Iran has been accused in the past of razing former nuclear sites and attempting to destroy evidence of their existence before international inspectors can collect evidence.