Iran has only a few hours left to come up with a clear plan to allow UN weapons inspectors back into the country and to reveal details of its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, or sweeping UN sanctions will be imposed, Emmanuel Macron has warned after a meeting with his counterpart, Masoud Pezeshkian.
The brief meeting between the French and Iranian presidents was the highest level diplomatic exchange so far in the effort to avert a fresh crisis over Iran’s damaged nuclear programme.
The deadline for reimposing sanctions is Saturday, but even allowing for mutual diplomatic brinkmanship, it appears negotiations are close to deadlock, prompting a further run on the rial in Tehran. Macron said on Wednesday that there was still a chance for a deal, while Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff said he was still talking with the Iranians. “We have a desire to negotiate with them,” he said.
In his address to the UN general assembly on Wednesday, Pezeshkian insisted Iran has never sought and will never seek to build a nuclear bomb, citing the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s fatwa against such weapons.
But such pledges have cut little ice with the foreign ministers of the E3 group – France, Germany and the UK – the three countries that have the power to snapback, or reimpose, the UN sanctions lifted in 2015.
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, met Rafael Grossi, the director general of the UN nuclear weapons inspectorate, in New York to set out which sites Iran was prepared for the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit in the wake of the joint Israel-US strikes on its nuclear sites in June.
The E3 are seeking full IAEA access to Iran’s nuclear sites, as well as access and knowledge of the 400kg highly enriched uranium stockpile that Iran says is buried in the rubble of its damaged nuclear sites. Grossi said he had a team ready to fly to Iran, and said he believed Iran could start enriching uranium at high purity levels in a matter of weeks or months.
The E3 also demand that Iran restart talks with the US on the future of its nuclear programme. The talks were broken off after Israel attacked Iran’s nuclear sites.
The snapback of UN sanctions would have a downside for Europe in that it would allow the US to control whether sanctions were ever lifted on Iran in the future – a power the US currently does not possess.
Iran’s ministry of intelligence also drew Grossi personally into the controversy, revealing informal photographs of him that they claimed had been gathered in a spying operation conducted by Israeli intelligence.
It also published film it claimed Iranian agents had taken inside Israel’s Dimona nuclear power plant. A key Iranian complaint is that Iran’s declared civil nuclear programme is subject to more international and UN scrutiny than Israel’s undeclared nuclear weapon centre.
In his speech to the general assembly, Pezeshkian held up photographs of some of the civilians killed in Israel’s June attacks, saying these children and families were not numbers but were love, light and hope.
He added: “Israel and its supporters are no longer even satisfied with normalisation through political means; they impose their presence through naked force and have named it peace through strength. But this is neither peace nor strength; rather, it is aggression based on bullying and thuggery.”
