A man carries his wounded child after an Israeli airstrike in Tehran on Sunday. The stream of wounded in the hospital in Tehran had been steady, but on Sunday it became a flood. A renewed wave of Israeli strikes on Iran’s capital overwhelmed the hospital’s emergency unit, turning it into what one doctor described as a “bloodbath”. “I’ve seen toddlers, teenagers, adults and the elderly alike. Profusely bleeding mothers were rushing in with their children injured by shrapnel,” the doctor said, adding that some parents did not realise they themselves were injured until they put their children down. Photograph: Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA (source)

Shortly after an IAEA report on Iran was published, Israel attacked Iran — allegedly to prevent Iran from developing nuclear bombs. But even the IAEA Director General said his agency didn’t find any proof that Iran was producing a nuclear weapon…

By Alison Weir

On May 31, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) issued a confidential report on the Iranian nuclear program.

This was immediately leaked to media outlets, including Reuters, BBC, the Associated Press, and The Washington Post.

The Post‘s article contains a clue suggesting why someone decided to leak the report so quickly:

News of the IAEA assessment came as President Donald Trump said the United States and Iran were close to agreement on a nuclear deal.

Israel has long viewed Iran as a strategic target and has repeatedly tried to push the U.S. into conflict with Tehran, just as it did Iraq. A nuclear agreement is the last thing Israeli officials want.

This motivation is also suggested by a little-noticed Reuters report published one day before the IAEA document was published: “West plans to push IAEA board to find Iran in breach of duties, diplomats say.”

Many of the myriad of media reports on the leaked report imply that the IAEA found that Iran was on the verge of producing nuclear weapons.

However, nowhere does the report even state that Iran is working on acquiring nuclear weapons, much less that it is about to have them.

In fact, it specifically states: “The Agency has no credible indications of an ongoing, undeclared structured nuclear programme.”

Eleven days later the report was officially declassified, and the next day the IAEA Board of Governors adopted a resolution on the subject. This was also immediately leaked to media.

The resolution was put forward by the United States, Britain, France and Germany and was quickly passed, although Russia, China and Burkina Faso voted against it and some countries abstained.

Once again, nowhere does the resolution state that Iran is developing nuclear weapons or is close to having them.

The resolution only states that the agency is not “in a position to provide assurance that Iran’s nuclear programme is exclusively peaceful.”

The UK Guardian was one of the few western news outlets to report on this clearly. On June 13 It published a detailed article stating:

Israeli PM alleges Tehran has capacity to make nine bombs. If so, Israel knows more than the US or the UN watchdog did.

The article reports:

In justifying Israel’s attack on Iran, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said he had acted to pre-empt a secret Iranian programme to build a nuclear bomb, claiming Tehran already had the capacity to build nine nuclear bombs. Israeli officials also claimed to have presented information to the US that Iran had recently made the necessary technical breakthroughs.

Netanyahu’s critics are saying he acted to pre-empt something else: a diplomatic agreement between the US and Iran on its civil nuclear programme, or even the demise of his own government. They point out that Israel has been saying for 20 years that Iran is on the brink of building a bomb.

The Guardian explicitly states:

A 22-page report declassified by the IAEA board this week did not say Iran was so close to a nuclear weapon.

It concluded that it could not verify that Iran’s civil nuclear programme was exclusively civilian. But it did not say Iran was on the verge of a nuclear weapon.

On June 17th, that fact was confirmed directly on television by the IAEA’s head.

In an interview broadcast on CNN, AEIA Director General Rafael Rossi stated:

We did not have any proof of a systematic effort to move into a nuclear weapon.

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Yet, due to the persistent pro-Israel spin and selective omission that permeates U.S. media, which repeatedly broadcast false claims by Israel and its partisans that Iran supposedly has a nuclear weapons program and is on the verge of having nuclear weapons, many Americans are convinced that the AEIA found Iran to be “weeks away” from developing a nuclear bomb.

Few realize that Israeli officials – including Netanyahu himself – have been repeating these unfounded claims for over 30 years, dating back as far as 1992.