VIENNA: Reviving Iran’s nuclear deal under US President-elect Joe Biden would require striking a new agreement setting out how Iran’s breaches should be reversed, UN atomic watchdog chief Rafael Grossi said.
Biden, who takes office on Jan. 20, has said the United States will rejoin the deal “if Iran resumes strict compliance” with the agreement that imposed strict curbs on its nuclear activities in return for the lifting of sanctions.
After President Donald Trump quit the deal and reimposed US sanctions, Iran responded by breaching many of the deal’s restrictions. Tehran says it could quickly reverse those steps if Washington first lifts its sanctions.
In an interview with Reuters, Grossi, who heads the International Atomic Energy Agency that polices Iran’s compliance, said there had been too many breaches for the agreement to simply snap back into place.
“I cannot imagine that they are going simply to say, ‘We are back to square one’ because square one is no longer there,” Grossi said at IAEA headquarters.
“It is clear that there will have to be a protocol or an agreement or an understanding or some ancillary document which will stipulate clearly what we do,” he said.
“There is more (nuclear) material, ... there is more activity, there are more centrifuges, and more are being announced. So what happens with all this? This is the question for them at the political level to decide.”
Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium is more than 2.4 tons, 12 times the cap set by the deal, though still far below the more than eight tons Iran had before signing it. Iran has been enriching uranium up to 4.5% purity, above the deal’s 3.67% limit though below the 20% it achieved before the deal.
Iran is enriching uranium in places where it is not allowed under the deal, such as at Fordow, a site dug into a mountain. More recently it has started enriching with advanced centrifuges at its underground plant at Natanz, where the deal says it can use only first-generation IR-1 machines.
“What I see is that we’re moving full circle back to December 2015,” Grossi said, referring to the month before the deal’s restrictions were put in place, after which large amounts of material and equipment were swiftly removed.
“If they want to do it (comply), they could do it pretty fast. But for all of those things we had a charted course,” he said.
New agreement needed to revive Iran nuclear deal under Biden, IAEA chief says
https://arab.news/6hmjs
New agreement needed to revive Iran nuclear deal under Biden, IAEA chief says
- Rafael Grossi said there had been too many breaches for the agreement to snap back into place
- Iran now has far more enriched uranium than deal allows
Drone strike kills 10, including 7 children, in Sudan’s El-Obeid: medical source
- An eyewitness said the strike hit a house in the center of the army-controlled capital of North Kordofan
PORT SUDAN, Sudan: A drone strike on the Sudanese city of El-Obeid killed 10 people including seven children on Monday, a medical source told AFP.
An eyewitness said the strike hit a house in the center of the army-controlled capital of North Kordofan, which the rival paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have sought to encircle for months.
Since April 2023, Sudan has been gripped by a war between the army and the RSF, with some of the worst violence currently unfolding in Sudan’s strategic southern Kordofan region.
El-Obeid, the region’s main city, lies on a key crossroads connecting the capital Khartoum with the vast western Darfur region — where the army lost its last major position in October.
Following its victory in Darfur, the RSF has pushed through Kordofan, seeking to recapture Sudan’s central corridor and tightening its siege with its local allies around several army-held cities.
Hundreds of thousands face mass starvation across the region.
Last year, the army broke a paramilitary siege on El-Obeid, which the RSF has sought to encircle since.
Drone strikes on Sunday caused a power outage in the city but left no reports of casualties.
Last week, a coalition of armed groups allied with the army said they had retaken several towns south of El-Obeid, which according to a military source could “open up the road between El-Obeid and Dilling” — one of South Kordofan’s besieged cities.
Since it began, the war has killed tens of thousands of people and forced more than 11 million people to flee internally and across borders.
It has also created the world’s largest hunger and displacement crises, and been described as a “war of atrocities” by the United Nations.
