Iran has accused its regional rival Israel of interfering in the International Atomic Energy Agency's report detailing its continued failure to provide satisfactory answers on the origin of uranium particles found at three undeclared sites.
Iran has not credibly answered the UN nuclear watchdog's long-standing questions on the origin of uranium particles found at Marivan, Varamin and Turquzabad nuclear sites despite a fresh push for a breakthrough, the agency said in a report on Monday.
It said its long-running efforts to get Iranian officials to explain the presence of nuclear material had failed to provide answers to its questions.
Iran and the IAEA agreed in March on an approach for resolving the issue of the sites, one of the remaining obstacles to reviving the 2015 deal.
IAEA chief Rafael Grossi is due to “report his conclusions” to the watchdog's 35-nation Board of Governors meeting scheduled for next week.
Iran said the report is “not fair.”
“Unfortunately, this report does not reflect the reality of the negotiations between Iran and the IAEA,” Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Saeed Khatibzadeh told reporters on Tuesday.
“It’s not a fair and balanced report,” he said, expecting this path to be corrected.
“It is feared that the pressure exerted by the Zionist regime [Israel] and some other actors has caused the normal path of agency reports to change from technical to political,” Khatibzadeh warned.
The comments came with talks deadlocked since March on reviving a 2015 nuclear agreement between Tehran and world powers.
A separate quarterly IAEA report on Monday estimated Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium had grown to more than 18 times the limit laid down in Tehran's 2015 deal with world powers.
The UN nuclear watchdog said in its latest report on Iran's nuclear program that it “estimated that, as of May 15, 2022, Iran’s total enriched stockpile was 3,809.3 kilograms.”
The limit in the 2015 deal was set at 300 kg of a specific compound, the equivalent of 202.8 kg of uranium.
The report also said that Tehran is continuing its enrichment of uranium to levels higher than the 3.67% limit in the deal.
The stockpile of uranium enriched up to 20% is now estimated to be 238.4 kg, up 56.3 kg since the last report in March, while the amount enriched to 60% stands at 43.1 kg, an increase of 9.9 kg.
Enrichment levels of around 90% are required for use in a nuclear weapon.
