One day after Iranian government officials reported that the electrical grid at the Natanz nuclear facility had been downed by a mysterious “accident,” Tehran has changed its tune and is now stating the incident was a result of “nuclear terrorism.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif had harsh words for Israel, giving a statement to state-controlled media outlet Press TV which said that the Jewish State was responsible for the outage and that Iran would be seeking to avenge the alleged act of sabotage.
“The Zionists want to take revenge because of our progress in the way to lift sanctions … they have publicly said that they will not allow this. But we will take our revenge on the Zionists,” Zarif said.
Calling the act “nuclear terrorism,” head of the nuclear program Ali Akbar Salehi also insinuated that Israel was behind the outage.
The statements come on the heels of increasing covert clashes between Iran and Israel. Last week, Israeli commandos were reportedly responsible for an explosion that caused serious damage to an Iranian ship in the Red Sea.
The alleged explosion came weeks after an Israeli ship in the Gulf of Oman was said to be damaged by an Iranian missile.
Israel has openly expressed its concerns regarding Iran’s nuclear program and is widely believed to have been behind several operations aimed at stemming the program’s progress.
In November 2020, Mossad operatives were reportedly behind the assassination of top Iranian nuclear physicist Mohsen Fakrizadeh, who was allegedly killed via a satellite-controlled machine gun.
In July 2020, a series of unexplained explosions at the Natanz nuclear facility and other nuclear sites in Iran destroyed critical equipment for uranium enrichment.