What we don't know about the Israel-Iran war

Australia Broadcast Center

2 days ago

It has been a chaotic two weeks since Israel launched its surprise attack on Iran, igniting a war between the regional powers.
At least 627 people have been killed in Iran and 28 in Israel, according to authorities in each country.
Thousands more were injured in the 12 days of relentless back-and-forth strikes.
A ceasefire brokered by the US — days after it bombed Iran's key nuclear facilities — appears to be holding for now.
But in what has been a fast-moving and often murky information landscape, many questions remain.
There's a lot to unpack with this conflict, so if you want to jump to a specific question, use the links below.
There is no clear, definitive timeline on how close Iran was to developing nuclear weapons.
In March, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said the country's "intelligence community continued to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon".
Last Wednesday, before the US bombed Iran's nuclear sites, President Donald Trump said Ms Gabbard, and the US intelligence community, were wrong.
The justification for Israel launching its attacks on Tehran two weeks ago was based on a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
It found that Iran had failed to comply with its nuclear obligations for the first time in almost 20 years.
It said Iran's uranium had reached about 60 per cent enrichment. Once uranium is enriched to 90 per cent, it is deemed weapons-grade.
Civilian nuclear power uranium is usually enriched to about 3 to 5 per cent.
In early June, the US Institute for Science and International Security said Iran could convert its stockpile of 60 per cent enriched uranium into 233kg of weapon-grade uranium in three weeks.
The institute estimated that would be enough for nine nuclear weapons.
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The only consensus among experts is that the severity of the damage is still unknown.
US President Donald Trump claimed the three key nuclear facilities the US bombed — Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan — had been "obliterated".
America's top military officer, General Dan Caine, also said an initial assessment found all three sites "sustained severe damage and destruction".
ABC Verify examined satellite imagery of the facilities, speaking to experts from the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS).
It found it was highly likely that Fordow's enrichment halls were severely damaged or even destroyed, the Natanz site was "likely destroyed" and Isfahan had sustained heavy damage to its main uranium conversion facility.
A US intelligence leak, acknowledged by the Trump administration, has cast doubt on claims the nuclear facilities had been obliterated.
The classified assessment found Iran's nuclear program had only been set back by a few months.
The preliminary report was made by the Defense Intelligence Agency, an arm of the Pentagon.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that leaked initial assessment was "low-confidence" and had been overtaken by intelligence showing Iran's nuclear program was severely damaged by the strikes and that it would take years to rebuild.
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There are no clear answers about whether Iran moved its enriched uranium before the US struck the three nuclear sites.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report detailed that Tehran had amassed 408.6kg of uranium enriched up to 60 per cent.
Iran has claimed about 400kg of it was moved before the US dropped the so-called "bunker-buster" bombs.
James Acton, a co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said "I tend to believe them".
Several experts cautioned that Iran may have moved enriched uranium out of Fordow, noting that satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies showed "unusual activity" at the facility on Thursday and Friday.
A long line of vehicles was pictured waiting outside an entrance to the site.
A US intelligence assessment, reported by CNN and acknowledged by the Trump administration, found that Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium was not destroyed.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt did not deny the existence of the assessment but said it was "flat-out wrong".
IAEA chief Rafael Grossi said Iran had informed the UN watchdog on the first day of Israeli strikes that it would take "special measures" to protect its nuclear materials and equipment.
"They did not get into details as to what that meant, but clearly that was the implicit meaning of that, so we can imagine that this material is there," Mr Grossi told reporters.
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Ben Saul, a United Nations special rapporteur on human rights and Sydney University international law professor, said the answer was clear.
"Both the Israeli and US strikes on Iran are clearly illegal under international law," he told the ABC.
"Iran had not attacked either country with a nuclear weapon, it didn't possess a nuclear weapon, and it wasn't threatening to imminently attack those countries."
Israel argues it attacked Iran in pre-emptive self-defence to counter the threat posed by the country's nuclear program.
When the US joined the conflict, it echoed the same justification.
Under international law — written into the Charter of the United Nations in 1945 — a country may only defend itself from an actual or imminent armed attack by another country.
Donald Rothwell, international law professor at ANU, said an imminent threat would require Iran having nuclear weapons capability and an intent to use them.
"There seems to be no substantive factual basis for any Israeli argument of a right of pre-emptive self-defence," Professor Rothwell said.
That also ruled out the US justification that it was acting in "collective self-defence" by aiding Israel.
Both Israel and Iran may have also breached international humanitarian law during the 12-day war by causing "indiscriminate or disproportionate damage to civilian residential areas", Professor Saul said.
He added the Iranian nuclear scientists Israel targeted were civilians who were not directly taking part in the hostilities.
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When a state acts in violation of the UN Charter, the matter would go before the United Nations Security Council.
But ANU international law professor Donald Rothwell said no action had been taken, and the US could veto any resolution that came before the council.
Australia backed the US strikes on Iran and said Israel had the right to self-defence.
The government has held its stance despite being questioned about the legality of the attacks.
Professor Saul, international law expert and United Nations special rapporteur on human rights, said there was also not much that institutions such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) and International Court of Justice (ICJ) could do.
Neither Israel nor the US have accepted the ICJ's jurisdiction, which is necessary for a case to be brought against those countries in that court.
"So the right thing to do is for every country that cares about international law to firstly condemn it loudly and publicly," Professor Saul said.
"And secondly, to consider imposing sanctions on the governments and the leaders that have broken what is really the most sacred taboo of international law of the last 80 years.
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The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was established in 1957, at a time of immense Cold War tensions and anxieties.
Several countries across the world had begun embarking on nuclear power and nuclear weapons programs.
But the recognition of the need for such an agency had dawned on scientists years earlier — perhaps as early as the aftermath of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan at the end of World War II.
In a speech in early 1946, just months after the end of the war, Manhattan Project physicist J Robert Oppenheimer said the advent of nuclear weapons had made "the prospect of future war unendurable".
In 1953, by which time the US and the USSR had developed nuclear arsenals, then-US president Dwight Eisenhower proposed the creation of the IAEA as a means of curbing the "fearful trend" of an atomic arms race.
For the past few decades, the core responsibilities of the IAEA have included the development of nuclear safety standards and ensuring compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
University of Melbourne public health expert Tilman Ruff — who helped establish the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which received the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize — said the IAEA had been "sidelined and very likely weakened as a result" of the joint US-Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.
"You can't bomb your way to nuclear non-proliferation and security and disarmament — it's got to come down to sustainable agreements that provide the same standard for all nations, that have integrity that all nations can trust," Dr Ruff said.
The IAEA played a vital role in ensuring that, despite the limitations some countries put on its power, he added.
After Israel launched its air strikes — but before the bombings by the US — IAEA director-general Rafael Mariano Grossi told the UN Security Council that attacks on Iran's nuclear sites "caused a sharp degradation in nuclear safety and security" in the country.
Dr Ruff said it was clear Mr Grossi was "frustrated that the actions taken by Israel and the US have not been based on IAEA assessments".
"He's worried that the IAEA now has much less access in Iran than it did before the attacks," he said.
"Iran has again — as it has in the past — raised the prospect of leaving the non-proliferation treaty, which would set the whole thing back further."
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The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, commonly known as the nuclear NPT, came into force in 1970.
The treaty rests on two pillars — commitments by non-nuclear-armed states that they will not acquire nuclear weapons, and commitments by all parties to "pursue negotiations in good faith" for complete nuclear disarmament.
Iran and the US are parties to the NPT, but Israel — which is widely suspected of having a nuclear arsenal but refuses to confirm or deny it — is not.
Dr Ruff said that amounted to a double standard, which was in itself a threat to non-proliferation.
"This is the absolute case of the pot calling the kettle black … When Israel is the only state in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons, about 90 of them, [and] has never joined the non-proliferation treaty," he said.
"The biggest driver of proliferation is the failure of the nine nuclear-armed states to disarm."
Dr Ruff believes the attacks on Iran could have the opposite effect to Israel and the US's stated intentions.
The attacks could incentivise countries — including Iran — to develop nuclear bombs, because of the weapons' deterrent value.
"Has this definitively dealt with Iran's potential to build nuclear weapons? No — and it may well have increased their resolve to do so, and diminished the international mechanisms that we have," he said.
US political scientist John Mearsheimer made a similar assessment, describing America's bombing of Iran as a "hammer blow" to the NPT.
"The message [to other countries] from what has happened in Iran is that you should have nuclear weapons," he said in an interview with Breaking Points.
Following the US bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities, the IAEA's director-general said the treaty, which had "underpinned international security for more than half a century", was now "on the line".
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The simple answer is: we don't know.
There has been speculation that the joint intelligence facilities at Pine Gap near Alice Springs, or the Naval Communication Station Harold E Holt near Exmouth in Western Australia, might have provided the US military with intelligence to help it conduct the strikes.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has largely brushed off questions about this, saying the government will not canvass intelligence issues in public.
Instead, he repeatedly emphasised that the US had acted "unilaterally" with the strikes.
Earlier this week, former home affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo — who would have a good grasp of how these facilities worked — told the ABC it was "possible" the US used the facilities under the "full knowledge and concurrence" framework adopted by both countries.
"It's hard to say from the outside but you'd have to think that to the extent that the Americans had a pre-existing concurrence from the Australian government to use those facilities for whatever purposes they deem necessary, it's possible [they did]," Mr Pezzullo said.
"But I wouldn't want to speculate."
Still, he said the fact the bombers travelled east from the US across the Atlantic to Iran, rather than west over the Pacific, meant there was probably "less scope" for involvement from the facilities in Australia.
"On that direction of travel, there's the likelihood of lesser Australian potential involvement, but beyond that, I really wouldn't want to speculate," he said.
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Israel and Iran both agreed to adhere to the ceasefire, but said they would respond with force to any breach.
For now, it appears the strikes have stopped and the US has said it is set to hold talks next week with Iran about its nuclear program.
Some analysts believe the ceasefire will hold because Iran has been weakened and needs an off-ramp.
But the big question is whether long-lasting peace is possible.
Ali Mamouri, Middle East studies research fellow at Deakin University, said Israel claimed to have achieved the bulk of its objectives for the war.
But with the extent of damage to Iran's nuclear program not fully known, volatility remained.
"Both sides could remain locked in a volatile stand-off over Iran's nuclear program, with the conflict potentially reigniting whenever either side perceives a strategic opportunity," he wrote in the Conversation.
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said it was too early for any declarations of victory.
He said talks between the US and Iran were necessary, but reaching nuclear agreements would be difficult.
"It is far too premature for the Trump administration or other governments to be declaring some sort of victory," he told ABC Radio National.
"Iran will be looking for assurances that it won't be attacked again by Israel or the United States and again, they will be looking for relief from the suffocating sanctions that have been in place."
Iran has not yet confirmed that talks will be taking place next week.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told state TV that Tehran was assessing whether talks with the US were in its interest.
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There are a range of predictions on what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could do next and what could unfold across the Middle East.
ANU associate professor of law Hossein Esmaeili said a lot depended on various political factors.
"Neither Israel nor Iran has achieved their goals over the past 12 days, and now is a time for talks and negotiation to work out a solution," he said.
As a result of this, there has been "a kind of balance of power" between Iran, Israel and the US, which could help calm the conflict between the countries.
"Iran did not wipe Israel off the map. Israel did not stop Iran's nuclear plans. What happens next depends on what happens now with Israeli politics," he said.
This week, US President Donald Trump called for Israel to cancel Mr Netanyahu's corruption trial or grant him a pardon, describing the case against the Israeli leader as a "witch-hunt".
Mr Netanyahu was indicted in 2019 in Israel on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. He has denied the allegations and pleaded not guilty.
Dr Esmaeili said Mr Netanyahu's next moves might depend on how long he could remain in power, and what happened if the corruption trial proceeded.
For the time being, Dr Esmaeili said he was "hopeful" the ceasefire would hold.
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