Iranian state media on Saturday said that the nation’s intelligence organizations have obtained a significant amount of sensitive Israeli material, some reportedly concerning Israel’s nuclear facilities and strategic designs. The material, the report said, was obtained in a secret operation carried out months ago but only just revealed because of the difficulty of safely moving the information into Iran.
PressTV, the government-owned channel, quoted unidentified sources as saying that the collection consists of documents, photographs, and videos and that Iranian intelligence agents have taken a lot of time perusing the huge amount of information. No particular information about the character or content of the documents was released.
The report follows increasing tensions over Iran’s nuclear program. Although there has been no official statement from Israeli authorities, it is not certain if the so-called intelligence leak is related to the reported 2023 hacking into an Israeli nuclear research center.
In 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had made the announcement that Israeli agents had taken possession of an extensive set of Iranian nuclear files, claiming Tehran had been pursuing more sophisticated nuclear development than has been previously revealed.
In a development running parallel, US President Donald Trump, long a hardliner on Iran, was said to have put on hold an impending Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear sites earlier this year, choosing instead to try increased negotiations with Tehran.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei recently rejected a main US condition in the current nuclear negotiations, stating that stopping uranium enrichment is totally against Iran’s national interests.
The disclosure of this so-called acquisition of intelligence adds another layer of sophistication to the already precarious structure of Middle Eastern geopolitics, especially as attempts to revive the Iran nuclear accord carry on under close scrutiny.
