{"id":229509,"date":"2025-07-01T14:26:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-01T14:26:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/229509\/"},"modified":"2025-07-01T14:26:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-01T14:26:09","slug":"iran-assesses-damage-after-israel-and-us-strikes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/229509\/","title":{"rendered":"Iran assesses damage after Israel and US strikes"},"content":{"rendered":"

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) \u2014 Iran is assessing the damage and lashing out over the American and Israeli airstrikes<\/a> on its nuclear sites, though Tehran kept open the possibility Tuesday of resuming talks with Washington over its atomic program.<\/p>\n

The comments by government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani also included another acknowledgment that Fordo, Isfahan and Natanz \u2014 key sites within Iran\u2019s nuclear program \u2014 had been \u201cseriously damaged\u201d by the American strikes<\/a>. Iran\u2019s state-run IRNA news agency quoted Mohajerani as making the remarks at a briefing for journalists. <\/p>\n

That acknowledgment comes as Iran\u2019s theocracy has slowly begun to admit the scale of the damage wrought by the 12-day war with Israel<\/a>, which saw Israeli fighter jets decimate the country\u2019s air defenses and conduct strikes<\/a> at will over the Islamic Republic. And keeping the door open to talks with the United States likely shows Tehran wants to avoid further economic pain as another deadline over U.N. sanctions looms. <\/p>\n

\u201cNo date (for U.S. talks) is announced, and it\u2019s not probably very soon, but a decision hasn\u2019t been made in this field,\u201d Mohajerani said.<\/p>\n

Iran offers rising death toll<\/p>\n

Israeli airstrikes, which began June 13, decimated the upper ranks<\/a> of Iran\u2019s powerful Revolutionary Guard and targeted its arsenal of ballistic missiles. The strikes also hit Iran\u2019s nuclear sites, which Israel claimed put Tehran within reach of a nuclear weapon. U.S. intelligence agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency had assessed Iran last had an organized nuclear weapons program in 2003, though Tehran had been enriching uranium up to 60% \u2014 a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%.<\/p>\n

On Monday, Iranian judiciary spokesman Asghar Jahangir offered a sharply increased, government-issued death toll from the war. He said that the Israeli attacks killed 935 \u201cIranian citizens,\u201d including 38 children and 102 women, IRNA reported. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe enemy aimed to change the country\u2019s circumstances by assassinating military commanders and scientists, intending to spread fear and exert pressure,\u201d Jahangir added. However, he asserted \u2014 like others up to 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei<\/a> \u2014 that Iran had \u201cwon\u201d the war. <\/p>\n

Iran has a long history of offering lower death counts around unrest over political considerations. The Washington-based Human Rights Activists group, which has provided detailed casualty figures from multiple rounds of unrest in Iran, has put the death toll at 1,190 people killed, including 436 civilians and 435 security force members. The attacks wounded another 4,475 people, the group said.<\/p>\n

Activity seen at Iran\u2019s Fordo facility<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, it appears that Iranian officials now are assessing the damage done by the American strikes conducted on the three nuclear sites on June 22, including those at Fordo, a site built under a mountain<\/a> about 100 kilometers (60 miles) southwest of Tehran.<\/p>\n

Satellite images from Planet Labs PBC analyzed by The Associated Press show Iranian officials at Fordo on Monday likely examining the damage caused by American bunker busters. Trucks could be seen in the images, as well as at least one crane and an excavator at tunnels on the site. That corresponded to images shot Sunday by Maxar Technologies similarly showing the ongoing work. <\/p>\n

The tunnels likely had been filled in by Iran before the strikes to protect the facility. The presence of trucks before the attacks has raised questions about whether any enriched uranium or centrifuges had been spirited away before the attack, something repeatedly claimed by Iranian officials. Even before the strikes, the IAEA warned that its inspectors had lost their \u201ccontinuity of knowledge\u201d<\/a> regarding the program, meaning material could be at undeclared sites in the country.<\/p>\n

Iran hasn\u2019t said what work is being done at the sites, though it has said that the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran planned to issue a report about the damage done by the strikes. <\/p>\n

Hard-liners lash out<\/p>\n

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, whose profile sharply rose during the war, also has kept open the possibility of talks with the U.S. <\/p>\n

However, hard-liners within Iran are increasingly criticizing any effort at negotiations or cooperation with the West. Iran\u2019s hard-line Kayhan newspaper, in a piece written by its Khamenei-appointed managing editor, Hossein Shariatmadari, mocked any possible talks Tuesday by saying being a \u201ctraitor or stupid are two sides of the same coin.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shariatmadari\u2019s newspaper on Saturday also suggested that the IAEA Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi, should be \u201ctried and executed\u201d if he visited Iran \u2014 something that drew immediate criticism from European nations and others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) \u2014 Iran is assessing the damage and lashing out over the American and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":229510,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5311],"tags":[26935,19751,90292,51,4179,774,14535,75715,8041,90293,90291,8547,70,14532,49,978,659,7660,10673,263],"class_list":{"0":"post-229509","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-2024-2025-mideast-wars","9":"tag-abbas-araghchi","10":"tag-asghar-jahangir","11":"tag-business","12":"tag-general-news","13":"tag-iran","14":"tag-iran-government","15":"tag-israel-iran-war","16":"tag-nuclear-weapons","17":"tag-planet-labs-pbc","18":"tag-political-and-civil-unrest","19":"tag-religion","20":"tag-science","21":"tag-tehran","22":"tag-united-states","23":"tag-us","24":"tag-usa","25":"tag-war-and-unrest","26":"tag-washington-news","27":"tag-world-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114778445275152315","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229509\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/229510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}