Satellite pictures suggest Iran has left its wrecked nuclear plants alone. What the pictures cannot show is where the country’s most dangerous material went. That was the uneasy message Rafael Grossi, who heads the International Atomic Energy Agency, delivered to the UN Security Council in New York on Tuesday.
According to Grossi, the agency’s remote monitoring has picked up no sign of repair or reconstruction work at facilities struck by American and Israeli bombs in 2025 and again this year. Among the hit targets are the Fordow and Natanz enrichment plants, parts of the Isfahan site and the Khondab reactor that was built to run on heavy water. Yet he was careful not to oversell the finding. Only inspectors on the ground, he told the council, can establish what is really going on.
The bigger worry is a stockpile of roughly 440 kilograms of uranium enriched close to weapons grade. Inspectors have been unable to check on it since they pulled out of Iran for safety reasons at the end of June 2025, when the strikes began. Grossi said his teams have been ready to go back for months, but Tehran still bars them from the bulk of its nuclear locations, so the agency cannot rule out that some material was diverted.
He pointed to a possible route forward: a deal he signed in Cairo in September 2025 with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, which set out practical steps for inspections after the attacks. Reviving it, he suggested, could settle how damaged plants and the material inside them are checked. Oman, Qatar, Pakistan and Egypt are all trying to bring Iran back to the table, and Grossi said the IAEA has worked closely with the US negotiating team.
His bottom line was blunt. Any agreement on Iran’s program, he argued, will only hold if independent inspectors can confirm it, and treaty obligations cannot simply be switched off by one side.
