The Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) convened its quarterly meeting in Vienna on Monday with the status of Iran’s nuclear program at the top of its agenda. IAEA Director General Raphael Grossi told the board in his opening statement that agency has had no access to Iran’s declared nuclear facilities nor received any information about its nuclear materials in more than a year. “Therefore, the Agency was unable to discharge its safeguards responsibilities under the NPT Safeguards Agreement at declared nuclear facilities in Iran,” he said. Grossi neglected to mention, however, that the U.S. and Israel bombed three of Iran’s declared nuclear facilities in June of 2025, and that a state of war still exists between Iran and those two countries.

Nonetheless, the U.S. and the so-called E3—the UK, France and Germany—still intend to bring a resolution before the Board of Governors to refer Iran’s nuclear program to the UN Security Council for the re-imposition of UN sanctions that were lifted in 2015 as part of the nuclear agreement of that year.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ismaeil Baqaei criticized the US-E3 effort, arguing during his Monday press briefing that such an initiative was legally contradictory, noting that the European countries and the United States had previously claimed that the so-called snapback mechanism had restored earlier UN Security Council resolutions. The “snapback” of UN sanctions was provided for in UN Security Council resolution 2231, which formally ratified the 2015 deal, but it expired in 2025.