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Playing With Fire When It Comes to Tehran
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting with government officials in Tehran, Iran, April 15, 2025. Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS/File Photo
JNS.org – About two-dozen Mossad agents broke into a clandestine warehouse in the middle of an industrial section of Tehran on Jan. 30, 2018, making away with more than 100,000 documents outlining the Islamic regime’s nuclear-weapons work. This collection covered years of Iran’s nuclear archive, including the AMAD Project’s production plans, enrichment projections and warhead designs.
Flash-forward seven years. According to an article that came out this week in Iran International, Rafael Grossi, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said: “Iran is not far from having a nuclear problem. They don’t have it, we know it. But the material for it, it’s already there. To make a few warheads.”
Grossi added that “it would be a matter of months, not years” and that the level of visibility is “insufficient.”
This is certainly verified by Andrea Stricker of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who recently wrote about a small building being destroyed by the Israelis in airstrikes last September, as part of the Parchin military project. The building was not on the list of what the IAEA had planned to visit, nor was it in the AMAD documents.
A 2018 Mossad document revealed that this building was used to test the explosive capability of a nuclear bomb’s core, known as a “hydrodynamic chain reaction.” Yet the IAEA could not enter it, and Grossi did not appear to even be aware of what was going on there.
This brings up one of the great flaws of the former nuclear deal—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA—made in 2015 under the Obama administration: The IAEA does not have immediate access to monitor and verify areas of Iranian nuclear weaponization. According to Section T of the JCPOA, Iran must “describe in writing its activity,” and the IAEA would simply engage in verification, post facto.
What, if anything, is to prevent a rogue state such as Iran from concealing its nuclear program?
The JCPOA also says that Iran must collect its own soil samples for inspection of nuclear particles (tantamount to saying that a serial drug user must conduct his own drug tests).
Yet about one month ago, speaking before a Senate Intelligence Committee, Tulsi Gabbard, the US director of national intelligence, declared that “the international community continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and Supreme Leader [Ali] Khomeini has not authorized its nuclear-weapon program that it suspended in 2003.”
She added that “in the past decade, we have seen a taboo within Iran against discussing Iran’s nuclear operations in public, likely emboldening nuclear-weapons advocates in its decision making public” She also added that “Iran’s nuclear stockpiles are at its highest levels, and it is unprecedented for state without nuclear weapons.”
Iran now possesses enough highly enriched uranium at the 60% level for at least six nuclear bombs. Israel is a one-bomb state.
Iran has just reported that after three years, they are turning on the cameras in their nuclear sites (at least the ones that are known).
After Israel decimated several of Iranian defensive nuclear sites in September 2024—with Hezbollah and Hamas in a tattered state, and President Donald Trump attempting to obliterate the Houthis from the Bad al-Mandeb Strait—and with the Iranian rial worth 0.000024 of a dollar, a majority of the country’s 90 million people are reportedly disgusted with the theocracy.
Most people have been born after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and a slim majority (50.1%) classify themselves as atheists. Many mosques (approximately 75,000) have been recently shuttered in Tehran.
I remain highly concerned that the regime wants to play out the clock and use the time as a smokescreen to conceal its weaponization program.
Remember, it is the Iranians who first invented the Persian Bazaar.
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Iranian Media Claims Obtaining ‘Sensitive’ Israeli Intelligence Materials
FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
i24 News – Iranian and Iran-affiliated media claimed on Saturday that the Islamic Republic had obtained a trove of “strategic and sensitive” Israeli intelligence materials related to Israel’s nuclear facilities and defense plans.
“Iran’s intelligence apparatus has obtained a vast quantity of strategic and sensitive information and documents belonging to the Zionist regime,” Iran’s state broadcaster said, referring to Israel in the manner accepted in those Muslim or Arab states that don’t recognize its legitimacy. The statement was also relayed by the Lebanese site Al-Mayadeen, affiliated with the Iran-backed jihadists of Hezbollah.
The reports did not include any details on the documents or how Iran had obtained them.
The intelligence reportedly included “thousands of documents related to that regime’s nuclear plans and facilities,” it added.
According to the reports, “the data haul was extracted during a covert operation and included a vast volume of materials including documents, images, and videos.”
The report comes amid high tensions over Iran’s nuclear program, over which it is in talks with the US administration of President Donald Trump.
Iranian-Israeli tensions reached an all-time high since the October 7 massacre and the subsequent Gaza war, including Iranian rocket fire on Israel and Israeli aerial raids in Iran that devastated much of the regime’s air defenses.
Israel, which regards the prospect of the antisemitic mullah regime obtaining a nuclear weapon as an existential threat, has indicated it could resort to a military strike against Iran’s installations should talks fail to curb uranium enrichment.
The post Iranian Media Claims Obtaining ‘Sensitive’ Israeli Intelligence Materials first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israel Retrieves Body of Thai Hostage from Gaza
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz looks on, amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, in Jerusalem, Nov. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
The Israeli military has retrieved the body of a Thai hostage who had been held in Gaza since Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack, Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Saturday.
Nattapong Pinta’s body was held by a Palestinian terrorist group called the Mujahedeen Brigades, and was recovered from the area of Rafah in southern Gaza, Katz said. His family in Thailand has been notified.
Pinta, an agricultural worker, was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz, a small Israeli community near the Gaza border where a quarter of the population was killed or taken hostage during the Hamas attack that triggered the devastating war in Gaza.
Israel’s military said Pinta had been abducted alive and killed by his captors, who had also killed and taken to Gaza the bodies of two more Israeli-American hostages that were retrieved earlier this week.
There was no immediate comment from the Mujahedeen Brigades, who have previously denied killing their captives, or from Hamas. The Israeli military said the Brigades were still holding the body of another foreign national. Only 20 of the 55 remaining hostages are believed to still be alive.
The Mujahedeen Brigades also held and killed Israeli hostage Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, according to Israeli authorities. Their bodies were returned during a two-month ceasefire, which collapsed in March after the two sides could not agree on terms for extending it to a second phase.
Israel has since expanded its offensive across the Gaza Strip as US, Qatari and Egyptian-led efforts to secure another ceasefire have faltered.
US-BACKED AID GROUP HALTS DISTRIBUTIONS
The United Nations has warned that most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population is at risk of famine after an 11-week Israeli blockade of the enclave, with the rate of young children suffering from acute malnutrition nearly tripling.
Aid distribution was halted on Friday after the US-and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said overcrowding had made it unsafe to continue operations. It was unclear whether aid had resumed on Saturday.
The GHF began distributing food packages in Gaza at the end of May, overseeing a new model of aid distribution which the United Nations says is neither impartial nor neutral. It says it has provided around 9 million meals so far.
The Israeli military said on Saturday that 350 trucks of humanitarian aid belonging to U.N. and other international relief groups were transferred this week via the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza.
The war erupted after Hamas-led terrorists took 251 hostages and killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, in the October 7, 2023 attack, Israel’s single deadliest day.
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US Mulls Giving Millions to Controversial Gaza Aid Foundation, Sources Say
Palestinians carry aid supplies which they received from the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, in the central Gaza Strip, May 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed/File Photo
The State Department is weighing giving $500 million to the new foundation providing aid to war-shattered Gaza, according to two knowledgeable sources and two former US officials, a move that would involve the US more deeply in a controversial aid effort that has been beset by violence and chaos.
The sources and former US officials, all of whom requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that money for Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) would come from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which is being folded into the US State Department.
The plan has met resistance from some US officials concerned with the deadly shootings of Palestinians near aid distribution sites and the competence of the GHF, the two sources said.
The GHF, which has been fiercely criticized by humanitarian organizations, including the United Nations, for an alleged lack of neutrality, began distributing aid last week amid warnings that most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population is at risk of famine after an 11-week Israeli aid blockade, which was lifted on May 19 when limited deliveries were allowed to resume.
The foundation has seen senior personnel quit and had to pause handouts twice this week after crowds overwhelmed its distribution hubs.
The State Department and GHF did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Reuters has been unable to establish who is currently funding the GHF operations, which began in Gaza last week. The GHF uses private US security and logistics companies to transport aid into Gaza for distribution at so-called secure distribution sites.
On Thursday, Reuters reported that a Chicago-based private equity firm, McNally Capital, has an “economic interest” in the for-profit US contractor overseeing the logistics and security of GHF’s aid distribution hubs in the enclave.
While US President Donald Trump’s administration and Israel say they don’t finance the GHF operation, both have been pressing the United Nations and international aid groups to work with it.
The US and Israel argue that aid distributed by a long-established U.N. aid network was diverted to Hamas. Hamas has denied that.
USAID has been all but dismantled. Some 80 percent of its programs have been canceled and its staff face termination as part of President Donald Trump’s drive to align US foreign policy with his “America First” agenda.
One source with knowledge of the matter and one former senior official said the proposal to give the $500 million to GHF has been championed by acting deputy USAID Administrator Ken Jackson, who has helped oversee the agency’s dismemberment.
The source said that Israel requested the funds to underwrite GHF’s operations for 180 days.
The Israeli government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The two sources said that some US officials have concerns with the plan because of the overcrowding that has affected the aid distribution hubs run by GHF’s contractor, and violence nearby.
Those officials also want well-established non-governmental organizations experienced in running aid operations in Gaza and elsewhere to be involved in the operation if the State Department approves the funds for GHF, a position that Israel likely will oppose, the sources said.
The post US Mulls Giving Millions to Controversial Gaza Aid Foundation, Sources Say first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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