As the two nations continue to exchange attacks for the eighth straight day, Rafael Grossi, the head of the UN’s atomic watchdog, has warned that an Israeli attack on Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant could lead to a regional catastrophe.
A direct hit on Bushehr, built on the Gulf coast by the Iranian-based IAEA, would have “very high levels of radioactivity,” the director of the organization’s director said on Friday, telling the UN Security Council.
At a session of the Iran-Israel conflict emergency session, Grossi urged attendees to never launch armed attacks on nuclear facilities. “I, therefore, call for maximum restraint,” Grossi said.
In the worst case, he claimed, evacuation orders would need to be issued for areas within several hundred kilometers of the plant, including population centers in other Gulf nations.
Grossi claimed that a strike on Bushehr’s two power lines could result in the melting of the reactor core.
Authorities would have to conduct radiation monitoring over a range of hundreds of kilometers, administer iodine to populations, and possibly halt food supplies.
Grossi reiterated his desire to work with others to reach a deal and made another appeal for a diplomatic solution.
He claimed that the IAEA can guarantee that Iran will not develop nuclear weapons through a watertight inspection system.
Grossi made his remarks as Bushehr’s air defenses were activated, according to the Iranian news website Rouydad24. Initial access to no details about the alleged Israeli attack’s target was lacking.
Israel “raising the spectre of fear.”
Iran has denied the claim that Israel launched an attack on Iran last Friday, saying its nuclear program is only intended for peaceful purposes.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who was also present, called on all parties to “give peace a chance” and said the Iran-Israel conflict had the potential to “ignite a fire that no one can control.”
Amir-Saeid Iravani, Iran’s UN ambassador, repeatedly emphasized the impact of Israeli bombings on the country’s citizens while displaying images of Iranian children killed in the attacks.
Iravani argued that Israel’s attacks were “gross violations of international law,” calling on the UN to intervene, and that the Security Council would “share responsibility” with the Israeli regime if it were to fall.
Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador, later accused Iravani of “playing victim.” We make no apology for our defense. We don’t feel bad about striking Iran’s nuclear facilities. He said, “We do not make any excuses for removing the threat.”
Gabriel Elizondo, a journalist for Al Jazeera, reported from the UN’s New York headquarters that Danon had been “trying to raise the spectre of fear and trying to win more support from other nations for Israel’s actions in Iran.”
Danon, he claimed, claimed Iran had the ballistic missile capability to strike Western Europe and even the US’s east coast.
Israeli attacks on “Iranian peaceful civilian nuclear facilities” were “liable to plunge us into a hitherto unseen nuclear catastrophe,” according to Russian UN Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya.
He continued, “Israel has ignored the assessments of the specialist international agency, and it has unilaterally chosen to strike against a sovereign nation without regard for the UN Charter.”
A senior Iranian official told the Reuters news agency that, “especially now with Israel’s strikes, any proposal for zero enrichment, which would be rejected, would be rejected.”
Nuclear disaster similar to that at Chernobyl
A military spokesman disputed the claim that Iran had struck Bushehr, calling the statement “a mistake,” according to Grossi, an Israeli military official.
Grossi claimed that Bushehr, Iran’s sole nuclear power plant, had been hit, but that neither could be confirmed or refuted.
Russian nuclear energy chief Alexei Likhachev had earlier said that any attack on the plant, where hundreds of Russian specialists work, could cause a Nuclear disaster similar to that at Chernobyl.
Grossi stated via videolink that the IAEA had no knowledge of the damage being done at Fordow, Iran’s underground uranium enrichment facility.
He claimed that the Natanz and Isfahan nuclear sites, as well as the Natanz enrichment site, had not experienced nuclear fallout as a result of the attacks.
