Iran keeps IAEA inspectors out of bombed nuclear sites

Iran's nuclear chief said this week that international inspectors will continue to be barred from visiting Iranian nuclear facilities struck by the United States and Israel, deepening a standoff with the U.N. atomic watchdog over access to the country's most sensitive sites.

Mohammad Eslami, head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, said Tehran will not allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency onto the bombed sites until new protocols are agreed for inspecting facilities damaged in wartime. "The IAEA is pressing to visit the damaged sites under pressure from the United States and Israel," Eslami said, according to Iran's state broadcaster PressTV. "The reason for that pressure is that they want to see what their military operation has done to those sites." He argued the country remains in a "wartime situation" and accused the agency of failing to condemn the strikes, calling it an intelligence tool for Iran's adversaries.

The impasse has a hard price attached. A Board of Governors report filed by IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi shows that, as of June 2025, the agency's last confirmed estimate put Iran's total enriched uranium stockpile at 9,874.9 kilograms, including 440.9 kilograms enriched to 60 percent purity — a short technical step from weapons-grade. Because Iran has since denied access to the four declared enrichment facilities and associated workshops, the report states plainly that the agency "cannot provide any information on the current size, composition or whereabouts" of that stockpile, or confirm whether Iran has suspended enrichment-related work at all.

The same document lays out how the standoff escalated. After Israeli strikes in mid-June 2025 and American strikes on three additional sites later that month hit seven declared nuclear facilities, including the Fordow enrichment plant, Grossi signed a September 2025 agreement in Cairo with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi setting out procedures for resuming inspections. But a fresh round of U.S. and Israeli strikes on February 28, 2026 — flagged in an interim Board of Governors report filed days earlier warning that cooperation remained incomplete — again halted verification work entirely. Since then the agency has managed just one inspection, a scheduled visit to the Bushehr nuclear power plant in early June, while the damaged enrichment sites have remained completely closed off.

Western governments have grown increasingly impatient. The State Department has cited Iran's continuing shortfalls under its safeguards agreement as evidence Tehran has not met its nonproliferation obligations, and President Trump told Al Jazeera this week that he is in no rush to resume negotiations, saying Washington remains focused on economic pressure instead. Iran, for its part, insists any resumption of access must come with guarantees for inspector safety and formal recognition of its sovereignty while military operations remain possible; Eslami has cast the demand for access to bombed sites as tantamount to a "battle damage assessment" carried out on behalf of Israel and the United States, according to Middle East Eye.

The result, nearly a year after the first strikes, is an accounting gap that both sides acknowledge but cannot agree how to close: the world's nuclear watchdog cannot say with confidence where Iran's near-weapons-grade material now sits, while Tehran refuses to grant access until it gets assurances that further strikes are off the table, a dynamic Democracy Now and other outlets say shows no sign of imminent resolution.