Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said a new approach should be taken for the monitoring of the country’s nuclear sites attacked in a recent war with Israel.
Tehran is under pressure from Western powers to allow inspectors from the UN’s nuclear watchdog into the facilities.
“We need a method or a framework for how to inspect those facilities,” he said in an interview with the British magazine The Economist, posted on his telegram channel on Friday.
“There are safety and security risks; there are unexploded ordnance, missiles, and the like. There is also the risk of radiation,” the Iranian top diplomat stated.
He added that Iran was also receiving threats of attacks from the United States should anyone got close to those facilities.
In mid-June, Israel launched an unprecedented bombing campaign against Iran, triggering a 12-day war that the United States briefly joined with strikes on key Iranian nuclear facilities.
Following the war, Iran heavily restricted access of the UN nuclear watchdog’s inspectors to its nuclear sites.
A few months later in September, an agreement was reached between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Cairo to establish a framework for cooperation.
That deal, however, was declared invalid by Tehran last month when Britain, Germany and France triggered the return of UN sanctions that had been lifted under a now-defunct 2015 nuclear deal.
On Thursday, the IAEA’s Board of Governors approved a resolution, demanding Tehran provide “full and prompt” cooperation including access to sensitive nuclear sites.
Iran in return, sent an official letter to the IAEA reiterating that the Cairo Agreement was “null and void”.
“Given that the E3 and the US seek escalation, they know full well that the official termination of the Cairo Agreement is the direct outcome of their provocations,” Araghchi said on X on Friday.
The 12-day war also derailed high-level nuclear talks between Tehran and Washington that had begun in April, during which the two sides were at odds over Iran’s right to enrich uranium — which Tehran defends as “inalienable”.
“Like the diplomacy which was assaulted by Israel and the US in June, the Cairo Agreement has been killed by the US and the E3,” Araghchi said in his X post.
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