Recently released satellite imagery shows that an incident at one of Iran’s main nuclear sites this week caused much more extensive damage than revealed by authorities, intensifying suspicions that there could have been an attack on the facility.
A satellite image released by London-based Iranian news outlet Iran International shows most of the building where the Thursday morning incident occurred blown up and blackened by burn marks and debris scattered around the perimeter, indicating a big bang.
Iranian authorities have said a fire broke out in an “industrial shed” at its Natanz nuclear enrichment facility in central Isfahan province, but US and European analysts said it appeared to be a site where advanced centrifuges – devices that rotate to extreme speed to convert uranium into nuclear fuel – they were under development.
The Natanz incident was followed by two other apparent industrial accidents on Saturday, which, along with fires and explosions elsewhere, have fueled speculation that the country is being targeted by a state-sponsored and organized sabotage campaign.
Israeli cabinet officials first spoke publicly on Sunday about the rumors. Neither Defense Minister Benny Gantz nor Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi confirmed any Israeli role, including in the latest fire at a power plant in the southwest of the country on Saturday. But his careful statements did little to allay suspicions that at least some incidents were not accidents.
“Not all incidents that occur in Iran are necessarily related to us,” Gantz told Israel Radio on Sunday morning. “All those systems are complex, they have very high security restrictions and I’m not sure [the Iranians] I always know how to keep them. “
When asked about Natanz, Ashkenazi said at a forum in Jerusalem that Israel had a long-term policy of not allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons, adding: “It is better not to mention our actions in Iran.”
Analysts said at least some of the incidents were likely to be accidents caused by poor infrastructure maintenance. But at least two incidents occurred at strategic sites: an explosion on June 26 at an alleged missile production facility east of Tehran, and the Natanz fire or explosion.
After the Trump administration withdrew from a nuclear deal with Iran and other countries in May 2018 and re-imposed sanctions on the Iranian economy, Tehran announced that it was developing advanced centrifuges capable of enriching uranium to weapon-grade levels more quickly. Although international inspectors say it has fallen short of producing such fuel.
Damage to the Natanz site would likely have delayed work on the new generation of centrifuges “quite a bit,” said Fabian Hinz, research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in California. Assembling, balancing, calibrating, and testing centrifuges is a really complex process that requires specialized equipment, so [the damage] it will definitely delay your work, “he said.
Keyvan Khosravi, a spokesman for Iran’s national security council, told a state-run media outlet on Friday that experts had “determined the main cause of the incident” and would declare it “in due course for security reasons.”
Journalists from the BBC’s Farsi service said they received a statement before the damage was published in which a group calling itself “Cheetahs of the Fatherland”, made up of disgruntled Iranians within the defense establishment, claimed to be responsible.
When asked on Thursday night about Natanz and the other incidents, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “It is clear that we cannot go into that.”
The Natanz site was targeted since 2007 by a cyber warfare campaign known as the Olympics that included the use of the Stuxnet computer virus, which encoded the code and caused the destruction of at least hundreds of centrifuges, among other damage. Israel and the United States were thought to be the architects of the operation.
Israel claims to have thwarted a large-scale cyberattack this year involving an attempt to damage and possibly infect parts of the country’s water supply, according to Yigal Unna, director general of Israel’s National Cyber Directorate.
He did not name Iran as a suspect, but said in May: “Yes [the attack] It had been successful, and fortunately we managed to thwart and avoid it, but if the bad guys had succeeded in their plot, we were now facing, in the midst of the crown crisis, very great harm to the civilian population. , lack of water and even worse than that. “
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