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A Farcaster Exclusive
1/2 - The IAEA’s Betrayal: How the Nuclear Watchdog Became Israel and America’s Attack Dog
The institutional collapse of nuclear oversight and the death of international law
The blood of 935 Iranians, including 38 children, stains the hands of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Their deaths in the 12-day Israel-Iran war that ended June 24, 2025, were not the result of some inevitable conflict, they were the direct consequence of a supposedly neutral international institution abandoning its mandate to become a weapon in the hands of Israel and the United States. The IAEA has become the very threat to global nuclear security it was created to prevent.
The Orchestrated Deception
The timeline reveals a conspiracy so brazen it insults the intelligence of the international community. On June 12, 2025, exactly 24 hours before Israel launched its surprise attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, the IAEA Board of Governors passed a resolution declaring Iran non-compliant with nuclear obligations. This was was calculated coordination between the IAEA and Western military powers to manufacture consent for war crimes.
The resolution, drafted by the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany, relied on intelligence from Palantir’s Mosaic, a 50-million-dollar AI platform that has been feeding the IAEA predetermined conclusions since 2015. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately seized upon this diplomatic gift, declaring it confirmation of Iran’s systematic nuclear weapons program, despite the IAEA’s own admission that they possessed no evidence of Iranian weapons development.
Within hours, Israeli warplanes were bombing Iranian nuclear scientists and facilities. When the United States joined with Operation Midnight Hammer on June 22, deploying seven B-2 stealth bombers to drop 12 bunker-buster bombs weighing 30,000 pounds each, the IAEA’s resolution had served its intended purpose: providing legal cover for the largest conventional bombing campaign against nuclear facilities in history.
The Corruption of Rafael Grossi
IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi stands as the principal architect of this institutional betrayal. His May 31, 2025 report highlighted Iran’s uranium stockpile while simultaneously admitting no evidence of weapons development, a contradiction so glaring it exposes either stunning incompetence or deliberate manipulation. When pressed by journalists, Grossi conceded the IAEA had no proof of systematic Iranian efforts to develop nuclear weapons. Yet he proceeded to issue condemnations that he knew would be weaponised within hours.
Iranian officials have accused Grossi of sharing sensitive information about Iran’s nuclear program and scientists with Israeli intelligence, accusations that gain credibility when examined against the precision with which Israel targeted specific facilities and personnel. The deaths of Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinations enabled by the very agency supposedly protecting them under international safeguards.
Grossi’s selective moral outrage reveals the depth of institutional corruption. While expressing tepid concern about attacks on Iranian facilities, he has remained silent about Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal of approximately 90 warheads. The agency applies crushing oversight to Iran, an NPT signatory operating peaceful nuclear programs, while giving a free pass to Israel, a non-NPT state with actual nuclear weapons. This is systematic persecution dressed up as international law.
The Weaponisation of Intelligence
The IAEA’s reliance on Israeli intelligence represents a fundamental corruption of its mandate. Israel’s theft of 55,000 pages of Iranian nuclear documents in 2018, publicly celebrated by Netanyahu, has become the foundation for ongoing IAEA assessments. The agency now operates as little more than a processing center for Israeli propaganda, transforming stolen intelligence into legitimate-sounding technical reports that justify military action.
This creates a perverse feedback loop where Israel steals documents, feeds them to the IAEA, receives official validation of its predetermined conclusions, then uses those conclusions to justify bombing the very facilities the IAEA was meant to protect. The agency has become an accomplice in intelligence laundering, providing international legitimacy to Israeli espionage operations.
The technical sophistication of the attacks on Iranian facilities reveals the depth of this intelligence sharing. Operation Midnight Hammer targeted specific underground installations with precision that could only come from detailed internal knowledge, knowledge that the IAEA, through its inspection regime, uniquely possessed. The agency provided the intelligence necessary to destroy them.
The Destruction of Institutional Trust
Iran’s response to this betrayal has been swift and total. On June 25, Iran’s parliament voted 221-1 to suspend all cooperation with the IAEA, a decision ratified by President Masoud Pezeshkian on July 2. Iran has cut communication with IAEA officials, ended inspections, and removed surveillance equipment. The agency now finds itself locked out of the very facilities it claims to monitor, unable to account for approximately 9,000 kilograms of enriched uranium.
This represents the complete breakdown of the international nuclear oversight system. When the supposed guardian of nuclear security becomes indistinguishable from an intelligence agency serving military powers, the entire framework of nuclear governance collapses. Other nations watching this spectacle must now question whether cooperation with international institutions is tantamount to providing intelligence for future attacks.
If transparency invites bombardment while opacity provides protection, rational state actors will choose secrecy over cooperation. The IAEA has not strengthened global nuclear security, it has shattered it, potentially for generations.
The Human Cost
Behind the diplomatic language and technical reports lie human tragedies that demand accountability. The 935 Iranians killed during the 12-day war include 38 children and 132 women who died because an international institution abandoned its protective mandate. Among the dead are 79 people killed when Israel bombed Tehran’s Evin Prison, an attack targeting civilians that violates every principle of international humanitarian law.
Iranian nuclear scientists, working under IAEA safeguards to develop peaceful nuclear technology, were systematically assassinated using intelligence gathered through the very inspection regime meant to protect them. Their deaths represent not just individual tragedies but the murder of international law itself. When institutions created to prevent conflict become instruments of war, civilisation itself is under attack.
Preliminary U.S. intelligence assessments reveal the hollow justification for this carnage: the massive bombing campaign set back Iran’s nuclear program by mere months. Hundreds died for a temporary tactical advantage that could have been achieved through diplomacy. The IAEA enabled mass killing for minimal strategic gain, a trade-off that exposes the complete moral bankruptcy of the institution.
The Facade of Legality
The IAEA operates behind a veneer of technical expertise and legal authority that masks its transformation into a tool of Western military policy. Its reports, dressed in the language of scientific assessment, provide diplomatic cover for actions that would otherwise be recognised as clear violations of international law. UN General Conference resolution GC(XXIX)/RES/444 explicitly prohibits attacks on peaceful nuclear facilities, yet the IAEA’s own actions enabled precisely such attacks.
This institutional capture represents something more sinister than simple bias, it is the systematic weaponisation of international law against states that dare to challenge Western hegemony. The IAEA’s double standards are not accidental inconsistencies but deliberate policy designed to maintain nuclear monopolies for Western-aligned states while preventing technological advancement among potential rivals.
The agency’s credibility is destroyed. Future IAEA reports will be read as potential intelligence products designed to justify military action. The institution has poisoned its own well, transforming from trusted mediator to suspected accomplice in international aggression.
The Need for Reconstruction
The scale of the IAEA’s betrayal transcends ordinary institutional reform. The agency requires complete reconstruction from the ground up, beginning with the removal of Rafael Grossi and his entire leadership team. Their complicity in enabling war crimes disqualifies them from any role in nuclear oversight.
New leadership must implement radical transparency measures, including public disclosure of all intelligence sources and explicit protocols preventing the use of stolen documents or intelligence from military agencies. The IAEA must apply identical standards to all nations, regardless of their relationship with Western powers, or surrender any claim to neutrality.
Most fundamentally, the agency must acknowledge its role in enabling the deaths of nearly a thousand people and take concrete steps to ensure such betrayals never recur. This requires criminal accountability for those who transformed a protective institution into an instrument of war. 1 reply
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2/2 - The Broader Implications
The IAEA’s betrayal extends beyond nuclear policy to threaten the entire framework of international cooperation. If specialised technical agencies can be captured and weaponised by military powers, no international institution remains trustworthy. The precedent encourages states to withdraw from international agreements and develop capabilities in secret rather than risk having their cooperation weaponised against them.
This collapse of institutional trust accelerates global fragmentation and makes future crises more likely to result in violence rather than negotiated solutions. The IAEA has not merely failed in its nuclear mission, it has damaged the broader project of international law and cooperation that underpins global stability.
Conclusion
The IAEA’s transformation from nuclear watchdog to attack dog represents one of the most serious institutional betrayals in modern international relations. The agency’s coordination with Israel and the United States to enable attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities violates every principle of neutral oversight and international law.
The 935 Iranian dead, including 38 children, are victims of institutional betrayal at the highest levels. Their blood demands accountability, not just from the military forces that killed them but from the supposedly neutral agency that provided the intelligence and justification for their deaths.
The international community faces a choice: hold the IAEA accountable for its crimes and rebuild nuclear oversight from scratch, or accept that international institutions exist solely to serve the interests of dominant military powers. The credibility of international law itself hangs in the balance.
Trust, once broken on this scale, cannot be repaired through cosmetic reforms or diplomatic platitudes. The IAEA as currently constituted is a threat to global security, not its guardian. Only complete reconstruction can restore the possibility of neutral nuclear oversight and prevent future institutions from becoming weapons in the hands of those they were meant to constrain.
The nuclear age demands institutions worthy of the awesome responsibility they bear. The current IAEA has proven itself catastrophically unworthy of that trust. For the sake of global security and international law, it must be rebuilt from its foundations, or the world must find new mechanisms to prevent nuclear catastrophe that do not rely on institutions corrupted by those who would exploit them for military advantage.
The victims of this betrayal deserve nothing less than complete accountability and systematic reconstruction of the institutions that failed them so catastrophically.
References:
This is not an exhaustive list. The above critique is a combination of main stream news and independent reports
Reuters - 935 people killed in Israeli strikes on Iran, official says,” June 30, 2025
CBS News - “Pentagon reveals how B-2 bombers struck Iran nuclear sites in mission dubbed ‘Operation Midnight Hammer,’” June 22, 2025
Al Jazeera - “Why Iran conflict has raised new questions about IAEA’s credibility,” June 25, 2025
American Enterprise Institute (AEI), “Iran Strike Was a Triumph That Showed American Weakness,” July 2, 2025
Peoples Dispatch, “Iranian parliament votes to suspend country’s cooperation with the IAEA,” June 25, 2025
Amnesty International, “Urgent need to protect civilians amid unprecedented escalation in hostilities between Israel and Iran,” June 2025 0 reply
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