VIENNA (Dispatches) -- Iran’s nuclear chief on Monday reiterated the country’s full and constant cooperation with the IAEA, urging the UN nuclear agency to remain independent and impartial and avoid politically-motivated decisions.
Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Muhammad Eslami made the remarks while addressing the 65th regular session of the General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which kicked off in the Austrian capital of Vienna.
“Iran has always cooperated with the Agency. At the same time, it is necessary that the IAEA avoids playing politics and maintains its independence, impartiality and professionalism,” Eslami said.
Regarding attacks on nuclear sites used for peaceful purposes, Eslami said as reiterated in several decisions and resolutions approved by the agency, an attack on a nuclear facility is “contrary to international law.”
“All armed attacks against nuclear installations devoted to peaceful purposes should be explicitly prohibited,” he added.
He slammed the “inaction” of the United Nations and the IAEA in dealing with acts of terror against Iran’s peaceful nuclear facilities, which, he said, “encouraged aggressors to continue and even reject the most basic and fundamental principles of international law and the United Nations Charter.”
It is highly imperative that the agency pay heed to this issue immediately in order to “safeguard the nuclear installations against such actions or threats, but also the credibility of the Agency,” Eslami said.
The IAEA, the official said, is obliged to help member states develop their peaceful nuclear program without any discrimination and strengthen technical cooperation with due consideration for the needs and priorities of the countries.
The UN nuclear agency should also assist the member countries in achieving the objectives of sustainable development through sharing knowledge, experience and transfer of technology and equipment “without any types of discrimination and political objectives.”
In April, Natanz nuclear facility was hit by an act of sabotage, which Iran called “nuclear terrorism” and a “war crime.” The attack, bearing the hallmarks of the occupying regime of Israel, targeted the electricity distribution

network of the enrichment facility and caused a blackout.
The Natanz facility, a uranium enrichment center located in the city of the same name in Iran’s central Isfahan Province, was also targeted in July 2020, in an incident that caused material damage to one of its inactive sheds in an open area.
While the Zionist regime has a policy of neither claiming nor denying responsibility for such attacks, Iran says Israeli footprints are all over the Natanz incidents.
Iran has also vowed to respond to the attacks at an appropriate time.
Elsewhere in his address, Eslami said the United States has pursued unilateral policies and violated the 2015 nuclear agreement, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and UN Security Council Resolution 2231, which endorses the deal, and pulled out of the JCPOA.
“The so-called maximum pressure policy was doomed to fail and the U.S. administration should abandon its addiction to unilateral sanctions and respect international law,” the AEOI chief said.
He criticized lack of commitment on the part of the three European signatories to the JCPOA -- Britain, France and Germany – and the European Union to their obligations as per the deal, which led to the adoption of a law by Iran’s parliament two and a half years after the U.S. withdrawal from the agreement and the expansion of its broad economic sanctions against Tehran.
“Now, it is the time for the U.S. to rectify the wrong policies and initially remove all sanctions in a practical, effective and verifiable manner,” Eslami said.
As declared by Iran’s President Ebrahim Raeisi, Tehran seeks results-oriented negotiations that would lift the unjust pressures and sanctions against the Iranian people, the official added.
The nuclear chief further said “a full and verifiable disarmament” would be the main solution to the existing threats of atomic weapons, stressing the importance of fully implementing Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
As the initiator of the idea of a Middle East region free of nuclear weapons since 1974, Iran expresses its serious concern about the Israeli regime’s secret military nuclear program, he added.
In an address to the quarterly meeting of the IAEA Board of Governors on Wednesday, Kazem Gharibabdi, Iran’s ambassador to the Vienna-based international organizations, slammed the UN nuclear agency’s deliberate silence regarding Israel’s nuclear arsenals, which are replete with atomic bombs, saying the world has been turning a blind eye to the Tel Aviv regime’s nuclear work for more than five decades.