Israel and the United States attacked this Friday (27) in the central region of Iran the Jondab heavy water complex and the Ardakan yellowcake (uranium concentrate) complex, two key substances for the development of fuel in the nuclear process, without any deaths or radioactive leaks being reported, according to Iranian authorities.
“To the plant of Jondab [reator de pesquisa de água pesada] it was attacked by Zionist and American enemies,” said the political, security and social deputy governor of Markazi province (center), Hasan Qamari, as reported by the IRNA news agency.
The provincial official claimed that “no radioactive leak occurred” and that “the population should not worry at all”.
Qamari considered that these attacks reflect “the desperation” of opponents “in the face of the scientific and industrial advances” of the Islamic republic and stated that they will not affect the development of Iran’s nuclear and industrial activities.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had released a statement in Persian on X in which they warned civilians that they would attack Iranian military infrastructure in the region.
After the attack, the IDF stated that the attack was carried out due to “repeated reconstruction attempts [do complexo] by the Iranian terrorist regime.”
In turn, the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (OEAI) announced that the United States and Israel attacked its yellowcake (concentrated uranium oxide) facility in the central city of Ardakan, where there was also no release of radioactive materials outside the complex.
This Ardakan plant is a facility where uranium ore is transformed into yellowcake, an intermediate step before nuclear enrichment.
Since the start of the Israeli and US war against Iran on February 28, another installation, the Natanz nuclear plant, had already been hit on two occasions, to which Iran responded by launching missiles and drones against the Israeli city of Dimona, very close to nuclear installations.
The attacks on nuclear power plants come two days after American President Donald Trump stated, in a speech in Washington, that the possibility of Iran having a nuclear weapon was a “cancer” that had already been “extirpated”.
“In the short term, what we had to do was get rid of the cancer. We had to root out the cancer. The cancer was Iran with a nuclear weapon. We rooted it out. Now we’re going to root it out,” Trump said.
It was not the first time that the US president and Israel have clashed over attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
In June last year, during a 12-day conflict with the Ayatollah regime, Iranian nuclear facilities were hit by both allies, and Trump claimed at the time that “annihilation is an accurate term” to describe the result of these actions.
Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission claimed at the time that the attacks “delayed Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years.”
However, when starting the new conflict at the end of last month, the two allies argued that Iran was very close to developing a nuclear weapon.
