Outgoing Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said in his last speech to his cabinet ministers on Monday night that Israel had indeed taken Iran's nuclear archive, as former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed in 2018.
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"The Israelis took out secrets out of the country and gave them to [then-US President] Trump. And President Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal," Rouhani said.
At a widely-reported press conference in 2018, Netanyahu reported that the Mossad had completed a daring and complex operation in Tehran that had led to its seizure of 100,000 documents on the Iranian nuclear program.
Netanyahu said at the time that the documents in the archive pertained to Iran's activities prior to the 2015 JCPOA nuclear accord and shed light on what he called Iran's attempts to dupe the international community about its nuclear aspirations.
On Tuesday, Iranian President-elect Ebrahim Raisi is expected to receive the official blessing of Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in the presence of a number of local dignitaries, as well as several foreign diplomats. On Thursday, Raisi is slated to be sworn in as president. Several dozen foreign envoys are expected to be present at the ceremony.
Once Raisi, considered one of Iran's more extremist public figures, becomes president, it is likely that it will be more difficult for Iran and western nations to hammer out a new nuclear accord. Ultimately, the decision about whether or not to rejoin a nuclear deal will fall to Khamenei, who has recently accused the US of being untrustworthy. Khamenei has also said that there is no point in Iran rejoining an agreement similar to the original 2015 JCPOA.
Meanwhile, as a number of western powers are accusing Iran of responsibility for a drone attack on an Israeli-operated ship in the Arabia Sea last week, Iranian Vice President Eshaq Jahangiri said Monday that Israel "sent people to our oil tankers to blow them up. 12 of our tankers have been bombed or damaged."
The New York Times recently ran a similar report that made similar allegations.
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