WASHINGTON: Iran is capable of producing fissile material for use in a nuclear weapon within “one or two weeks,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday.
The details on Iran’s capabilities emerged following the recent election of President Masoud Pezeshkian.
He has said he wants to end Iran’s isolation and favors reviving the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and global powers.
Blinken said, however, that “what we’ve seen in the last weeks and months is an Iran that’s actually moving forward” with its nuclear program.
In 2018, the United States unilaterally withdrew from the nuclear deal, which was designed to regulate Iran’s atomic activities in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions.
Speaking at a security forum in Colorado, Blinken blamed the collapse of the nuclear deal for the acceleration in Iran’s capabilities.
“Instead of being at least a year away from having the breakout capacity of producing fissile material for a nuclear weapon, (Iran) is now probably one or two weeks away from doing that,” Blinken said.
He added that Iran had not yet developed a nuclear weapon.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said last month that Iran is further expanding its nuclear capacities, with Tehran informing the agency that it was installing more cascades — or series of centrifuges used in enrichment — at nuclear facilities in Natanz and Fordow.
According to the IAEA, Iran is the only non-nuclear weapons state to enrich uranium to the high level of 60 percent — just short of weapons-grade — while it keeps accumulating large uranium stockpiles, enough to build several atomic bombs, the agency says.
Following the US withdrawal, the Islamic republic has gradually broken away from its commitments under the 2015 nuclear deal.
But the country’s acting foreign minister Ali Bagheri told CNN earlier this week that Iran remained committed to the accord, known as the JCPOA.
“We are still a member of JCPOA. America has not yet been able to return to the JCPOA, so the goal we are pursuing is the revival of the 2015 agreement,” he said. “We are not looking for a new agreement.”
Bagheri said no one in Iran had talked “about a new agreement. We have an agreement (signed) in 2015.”
Blinken was speaking just days after reports that the US Secret Service had increased security for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump weeks ago, after authorities learned of an alleged Iranian plot to kill him.
Tehran has denied the allegations.
Iran can produce fissile material for bomb in ‘one or two weeks’: Blinken
https://arab.news/9mrus
Iran can produce fissile material for bomb in ‘one or two weeks’: Blinken
Israel aims to bring ‘permanent demographic change’ to West Bank, Gaza: UN
- UN rights chief Volker Turk says Israeli military operation in West Bank’s north has displaced 32,000 Palestinians
GENEVA: Israel’s actions in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip seem aimed at creating “permanent demographic change,” UN rights chief Volker Turk said on Thursday.
“Taken together, Israel’s actions appear aimed at making a permanent demographic change in Gaza and the West Bank, raising concerns about ethnic cleansing,” Turk said in a speech before the UN’s Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Turk pointed in particular to an ongoing, year-long Israeli military operation in the West Bank’s north that has caused the displacement of 32,000 Palestinians.
Elsewhere in the West Bank, entire Bedouin herder communities have been displaced by increasing harassment and violence from Israeli settlers, including near Mikhmas to the east of Ramallah, and Ras Ein Al-Auja, in the Jordan Valley, since the start of the year.
In addition to roughly three million Palestinians, more than 500,000 Israelis live in settlements and outposts in the West Bank, which are considered illegal under international law.
Israel has approved a series of initiatives this month backed by far-right ministers, including launching a process to register land in the West Bank as “state property” and allowing Israelis to purchase land there directly, in a move condemned by several countries as well as Hamas.
Israel’s current government has accelerated settlement expansion, approving a record 54 settlements in 2025, according to Israeli settlement watchdog NGO Peace Now.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967.
‘Maximum land, minimum Arabs’
In the Gaza Strip, most of the territory’s 2.2 million inhabitants have been displaced at least once since the start of the war sparked by Hamas’s unprecedented attack against Israel on October 7, 2023.
“Intensified attacks, the methodical destruction of entire neighborhoods and the denial of humanitarian assistance appeared to aim at a permanent demographic shift in Gaza,” the UN human rights office said in a report last week.
Israeli far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich also vowed to encourage “emigration” from the Palestinian territories in February.
“We will finally, formally and in practical terms nullify the cursed Oslo Accords and embark on a path toward sovereignty, while encouraging emigration from both Gaza and Judea and Samaria,” he said, using the Biblical term for the West Bank.
“There is no other long-term solution,” added Smotrich, who himself lives in a settlement in the West Bank.
“They want maximum land and minimum Arabs,” Fathi Nimer, a researcher with Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka, told AFP, referring to a commonly used phrase used to describe Israeli settlement tactics.
