Trump ‘to demand that Iran hands over enriched uranium'
A report ahead of next week's US-Iran talks said America requires the Islamic Republic to give up any nuclear fuel enriched to 60 per cent or more, which is near weapons-grade.
Mr Trump is also planning to demand that Iran agrees to a ban on any further enrichment of uranium and a cap on the production of missiles, the report said.
The parties are due to meet next week for the first time following Israel's 12-day bombing campaign against Iran, which also included US strikes against the nuclear weapons programme.
Mr Trump has said Iran's key Fordow enrichment site, which America attacked with bunker-busting bombs, saw 'total obliteration', and that the operation set back Iran's nuclear weapons programme by 'decades'.
On Wednesday, John Ratcliffe, the director of the CIA, said in a statement that intelligence from a 'historically reliable' source indicated that 'several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years.'
However, there has been concern, prompted in part by satellite imagery showing trucks leaving Fordow before the attack, that Iran may have saved significant quantities of its enriched uranium.
This comes on top of earlier intelligence leaks to various US news outlets suggesting that the attacks had only set back the programme by a matter of months, prompting furious denials from the White House.
Mr Trump has hit out at the 'scum' who leaked intelligence suggesting his raids on Iran's nuclear facilities were not as effective as he declared.
If confirmed, however, the report in Thursday's edition of the Israel Hayom newspaper indicated the Americans were privately less confident about the success of their military intervention.
Before the war started on June 13, the International Atomic Energy Agency said it believed Iran had 408.6kg of uranium enriched to 60 per cent.
Further enriching the nuclear material to weapons-grade, for which the threshold is 90 per cent, is a relatively quick process. The quantity would provide enough fuel for roughly 10 nuclear warheads.
The nightmare for Israeli intelligence officials is that Iran spirited some of this material away to unknown labs where it could be fashioned into a 'crude' device.
This is a relatively unsophisticated warhead which has not been miniaturised and mounted onto a ballistic missile.
Instead, it would have to be manually delivered to its target – smuggled into Tel Aviv in a truck, for example – before being detonated.
Although US-Iran talks had been ongoing for many weeks before Benjamin Netanyahu ordered Israel's unilateral attack on Iran, progress was understood to have stalled because Iran refused to dismantle its enrichment process.
The report in Israel Hayom suggests Mr Trump believes the destruction wrought by both Israel and America over the past week will force the Islamic Republic to soften its stance.
Some Israeli officials have a habit of briefing journalists anonymously with scenarios they would like to see happen, rather than ones that are necessarily taking place.
Speaking on Wednesday at the Nato summit in The Hague, Mr Trump suggested that Israel had sent agents into the Fordow nuclear plant following the attack, to confirm its success.
'You know they have guys that go in there after the hit, and they said it was total obliteration,' he said.
Israeli officials told the Kan public broadcaster that they had no knowledge of such a mission.
Mr Trump also said the US would strike Iran again if it restarted nuclear enrichment. Asked how much he thought the Iranian nuclear programme had been set back, Mr Trump said: 'I think it's basically decades, because I don't think they'll ever do it again.
'I think they've had it. I mean, they just went through hell. They've had it.'
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The Guardian
27 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘Humanitarian city' would be concentration camp for Palestinians, says former Israeli PM
The 'humanitarian city' Israel's defence minister has proposed building on the ruins of Rafah would be a concentration camp, and forcing Palestinians inside would be ethnic cleansing, Israel's former prime minister Ehud Olmert has told the Guardian. Israel was already committing war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank, Olmert said, and construction of the camp would mark an escalation. 'It is a concentration camp. I am sorry,' he said, when asked about the plans laid out by Israel Katz last week. Once inside, Palestinians would not be allowed to leave, except to go to other countries, Katz said. Katz has ordered the military to start drawing up operational plans for construction of the 'humanitarian city' on the ruins of southern Gaza, to house initially 600,000 people and eventually the entire Palestinian population. 'If they [Palestinians] will be deported into the new 'humanitarian city', then you can say that this is part of an ethnic cleansing. It hasn't yet happened,' Olmert said. That would be 'the inevitable interpretation' of any attempt to create a camp for hundreds of thousands of people, he said. Olmert did not consider Israel's current campaign was ethnic cleansing because, he said, evacuating civilians to protect them from fighting was legal under international law, and Palestinians had returned to areas where military operations had finished. The 'humanitarian city' project is backed by Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Israel's refusal to withdraw from the area Katz envisages for the camp is a sticking point in the faltering negotiations for a ceasefire deal, Israeli media have reported. Olmert said that after months of violent rhetoric, including calls from ministers to 'cleanse' Gaza and projects to build Israeli settlements there, government claims that the 'humanitarian city' aimed to protect Palestinians were not credible. 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Olmert, who led Israel from 2006 to 2009, spoke to the Guardian on the day funerals were held in the occupied West Bank for two Palestinian men, one an American citizen, who had been killed by Israeli settlers. The latest deaths came after a campaign of violent intimidation that has forced the residents of several villages to flee their homes over the past two years. The attacks were war crimes, Olmert said. '[It is] unforgivable. Unacceptable. There are continuous operations organised, orchestrated in the most brutal, criminal manner by a large group.' The attackers are often called 'hilltop youth' in Israel and described as fringe extremists. Olmert said he preferred the term 'hilltop atrocities' to describe the young men whose campaign of spiralling violence was carried out with near-total impunity. 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'Ashamed and heartbroken' that a war of self-defence had become something else, he decided to speak out. 'What can I do to change the attitude, except for number one, recognising these evils, and number two, to criticise them and to make sure the international public opinion knows there are [other] voices, many voices in Israel?' he asked. He attributed what he called war crimes to negligence and a willingness to tolerate unconscionable levels of death and devastation, rather than an organised campaign of brutality. '[Did commanders] give an order? Never,' Olmert said. Instead, he believes the military looked away when things were done that would inevitably 'cause the killing of a large number of non-involved people'. He said: 'That is why I cannot refrain from accusing this government of being responsible for war crimes committed.' Despite the devastation in Gaza, as the last Israeli premier to seriously attempt to reach a negotiated solution with Palestinians, Olmert still hopes that a two-state solution is possible. He is working with the former Palestinian foreign minister Nasser al-Kidwa to push for one internationally, and even believes that a historic settlement could be in reach – an end to the war in Gaza in exchange for normalisation of ties with Saudi Arabia – if only Netanyahu was able or willing to take it. Instead Olmert was stunned to see Netanyahu, a man who has an arrest warrant for war crimes from the international criminal court, nominating Donald Trump for a Nobel peace prize. Additional reporting by Quique Kierszenbaum
Times
an hour ago
- Times
Why is Putin pushing Tehran towards Trump's nuclear deal?
As an old ally of Iran, the Kremlin's position has long been that the regime has the right to develop nuclear energy, while acknowledging that Tehran's race for a bomb should be curtailed. So reports this weekend that Russia is leaning on Iran to accept a deal that denies it the right to enrich uranium for any purpose have provoked a typically caustic response from Moscow. Any suggestion that President Putin hoped to pressure Tehran into such a nuclear deal with the United States, said Russia's foreign ministry on Sunday, was part of a 'dirty, politicised campaign, which is being hatched with the aim of escalating tension around the Iranian nuclear programme'. Moscow's protests, however, may hide a more subtle approach than it wants to admit. Sources familiar with the discussions told Axios that Putin had informed President Trump and Iranian officials that he supported the idea of a nuclear deal in which Iran is unable to enrich uranium. Moscow had encouraged the Iranians to agree to this 'zero enrichment' condition, according to four officials — three European and one Israeli — with knowledge of the matter. • Trump says Putin 'just wants to kill people' — is their bromance over? Two sources told Axios that the Russians had also briefed the Israeli government about Putin's position on Iran's uranium enrichment. 'We know that this is what Putin told the Iranians,' a senior Israeli official said. A European official told Axios: 'Putin would support zero enrichment. He encouraged the Iranians to work towards that in order to make negotiations with the Americans more favourable.' Putin was also said to have expressed that position in calls last week with Trump and President Macron of France. So far, the Iranians appear to have rejected Putin's overture, but the claims suggest that the Kremlin's strategy on any nuclear deal is more nuanced than it is prepared to let on. Russia and Iran have a long-standing bond, and their forces cooperated for years in Syria in support of President Assad, before his regime collapsed in December. Ties strengthened after Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when Russia joined Iran as one of the most heavily sanctioned states in the world. Iran exported thousands of Shahed drones to Moscow for use in its attacks on Ukrainian cities, although the reliance has since diminished after Russia increased production of its own attack drones. The Kremlin's challenge over Israeli and American airstrikes on Iran last month and Trump's push for a nuclear deal is intended to balance several competing interests. Conflict in the region holds the promise of rising oil prices — advantageous to Russia as a major producer — and a distraction from continued attacks on Ukraine, condemned in the West. But the Kremlin shied away from providing explicit security guarantees to Iran when they agreed on a strategic partnership in January. After Israel launched its strikes, Russia disappointed Tehran by providing only verbal support. The dangers posed by the potential for further Israeli strikes were underlined on Sunday when it emerged that Iran's President Pezeshkian was wounded in the leg and forced to escape through an emergency hatch when Israel struck a meeting of Iran's Supreme National Security Council with six missiles during the 12-day war. Experts said that Moscow was probably pushing for a deal because it is wary of Iran disintegrating under renewed assault, which could threaten Russia's economic interests. Russia was Iran's biggest foreign investor last year, and its specialists are deeply involved at Bushehr nuclear power plant in southern Iran, which was built by Russia's atomic energy agency, Rosatom. Iranian nuclear scientists have also been trained in Russia. There are plans to build a natural gas pipeline from Russia to Iran via Azerbaijan, and an albeit faltering project for Moscow to help construct a gas hub for exporting supplies to third countries. 'The main problem faced by Russia in the current circumstances is the threat to all the projects in Iran in which it has been actively investing since 2022,' said Nikita Smagin, an expert on Iranian affairs and Russian policy in the Middle East, in a recent analysis for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 'If Iran becomes permanently unstable as a result of the current attacks, then both the gas hub and other more realistic projects will go up in smoke, along with the investments already made.' Iranian sources claimed on Sunday that Putin had not urged Tehran to accept a 'no enrichment deal'. The Washington Post reported that, amid a power struggle among Iranian elites, those advocating negotiation with the US over the nuclear programme may increasingly have the upper hand over those favouring confrontation. Gregory Brew, a senior analyst on Iran and energy at Eurasia Group, predicted Iran would remain intransigent, but noted its position now looked starker. 'Russia pushing zero enrichment won't be enough to move Tehran, but it does underscore Iran's growing isolation, especially with the E3 threatening snapback,' he said, referring to Britain, France and Germany, the three signatories to the original deal with Iran in 2015, and the fact they could reimpose previously-lifted UN sanctions.
Reuters
3 hours ago
- Reuters
Netanyahu aide faces indictment over Gaza leak
JERUSALEM, July 13 (Reuters) - An aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces indictment on security charges pending a hearing, Israel's attorney general said on Sunday, for allegedly leaking top secret military information during Israel's war in Gaza. Netanyahu's close adviser, Jonatan Urich, has denied any wrongdoing in the case which legal authorities began investigating in late 2024. The prime minister has described probes against Urich and other aides as a witch-hunt. Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara said in a statement that Urich and another aide had extracted secret information from the Israeli military and leaked it to German newspaper Bild. Their intent, she said, was to shape public opinion of Netanyahu and influence the discourse about the slaying of six Israeli hostages by their Palestinian captors in Gaza in late August 2024. The hostages' deaths had sparked mass protests in Israel and outraged hostage families, who accused Netanyahu of torpedoing ceasefire talks that had faltered in the preceding weeks for political reasons. Netanyahu vehemently denies this. He has repeatedly said that Hamas was to blame for the talks collapsing, while the militant group has said it was Israel's fault no deal had been reached. Four of the six slain hostages had been on the list of more than 30 captives that Hamas was set to free were a ceasefire to be reached, according to a defence official at the time. The Bild article in question was published days after the hostages were found executed in a Hamas tunnel in southern Gaza. It outlined Hamas' negotiation strategy in the indirect ceasefire talks and largely corresponded with Netanyahu's allegations against the militant group over the deadlock. Bild said after the investigation was announced that it does not comment on its sources and that its article relied on authentic documents. A two-month ceasefire was reached in January this year and included the release of 38 hostages before Israel resumed attacks in Gaza. The sides are presently engaged in indirect negotiations in Doha, aimed at reaching another truce.
