Israeli attack on nuclear sites to prompt tit-for-tat, pursuing nukes: Iran

A technician works in the control room at the uranium conversion facility in Isfahan [File: Caren Firouz/Reuters]

Israeli attack on nuclear sites to prompt tit-for-tat, pursuing nukes: Iran

Al Jazeera-April18th2024

Tehran, Iran – Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has warned that it would attack Israel’s nuclear sites and may pursue a nuclear weapon if the country strikes at Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The development came on Thursday, after Israeli officials promised a response to Iran’s unprecedented attacks on Israel last week, which were a retaliation for the Israeli military’s suspected targeting of Tehran’s consulate in Syria.

“The nuclear facilities of the Zionist enemy have been identified and all the necessary information from all targets is at our disposal,” the IRGC’s Brigadier General Ahmad Haghtalab was quoted as saying by Iran’s semiofficial Tasnim news website.

“Our fingers are on the trigger of firing strong missiles to destroy the designated targets in response to a potential attack by them,” said the commander of the IRGC division that is tasked with protecting Iranian nuclear facilities.

Haghtalab also gave what is Iran’s highest-level and most direct warning yet that it may abandon its stated policy of refraining from building a nuclear bomb.

“If the fake Zionist regime wants to use the threat of attacking the nuclear centres of our country as a tool, reconsidering the doctrine and policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and deviating from previously stated considerations would be likely and imaginable,” he said.

Iran’s top nuclear facilities, especially the installations at Natanz in central Isfahan, have been subject to multiple significant sabotage attacks blamed on Israel amid a shadow war in more than a decade that also saw several Iranian nuclear scientists assassinated.

But Israel has never directly attacked Iranian soil, let alone its nuclear facilities.

In March 2022, after several high-profile sabotage attacks and as the IRGC said it foiled yet another attack, the new nuclear security command unit of the elite force was first publicly mentioned.

Iran is currently enriching uranium up to 60 percent, which is a short technical step from the more than 90 percent enrichment required for an atomic bomb.