Iran assesses the damage and lashes out after Israeli and US strikes damage its nuclear sites

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) – Iran is assessing the damage and lashing out over the American and Israeli airstrikes on its nuclear sites, though Tehran kept open the possibility Tuesday of resuming talks with the Washington over its atomic program.

The comments by government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani also included another acknowledgment that the American strikes at Fordo, Isfahan and Natanz – key sites within Iran’s program – had been “seriously damaged” by the bombing. Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency quoted Mohajerani as making the remarks at a briefing for journalists.

That acknowledgment comes as Iran’s theocracy has slowly begun to admit the scale of the damage wrought by the 12-day war with Israel, which saw Israeli fighter jets decimate the country’s air defenses and conduct strikes at will over the Islamic Republic. And keeping the door open to talks with the United States likely shows Tehran wants to avoid further economic pain as another deadline over U.N. sanctions loom.

“No date (for U.S. talks) is announced, and it’s not probably very soon, but a decision hasn’t been made in this field,” Mohajerani said.

Israeli airstrikes, which began June 13, decimated the upper ranks of Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard and targeted its arsenal of ballistic missiles. The strikes also hit Iran’s nuclear sites, which Israel claimed put Tehran within reach of a nuclear weapon. U.S. intelligence agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency had assessed Iran last had an organized nuclear weapons program in 2003, though Tehran had been enriching uranium up to 60% – a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%.

On Monday, Iranian judiciary spokesman Asghar Jahangir offered a sharply increased, government-issued death toll from the war. He said that the Israeli attacks killed 935 “Iranian citizens,” including 38 children and 102 women, IRNA reported.

“The enemy aimed to change the country’s circumstances by assassinating military commanders and scientists, intending to spread fear and exert pressure,” Jahangir added. However, he asserted – like others up to 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – that Iran had “won” the war.

Iran has a long history of offering lower death counts around unrest over political considerations. The Washington-based Human Rights Activists group, which has provided detailed casualty figures from multiple rounds of unrest in Iran, has put the death toll at 1,190 people killed, including 436 civilians and 435 security force members. The attacks wounded another 4,475 people, the group said.

Meanwhile, it appears that Iranian officials now are assessing the damage done by the American strikes conducted on the three nuclear sites on June 22, namely those at Fordo, a site built under a mountain about 100 kilometers (60 miles) southwest of Tehran.

Satellite images from Planet Labs PBC analyzed by The Associated Press show Iranian officials at Fordo on Monday likely examining the damage caused by American bunker busters. Trucks could be seen in the images, as well as at least one crane and an excavator at tunnels on the site. That corresponded to images shot Sunday by Maxar Technologies similarly showing the ongoing work.

The tunnels likely had been filled in by Iran before the strikes to protect the facility. The presence of trucks before the attacks has raised questions about whether any enriched uranium or centrifuges had been spirited away before the attack, something repeatedly claimed by Iranian officials. Even before the strikes, the IAEA warned that its inspectors had lost their “continuity of knowledge” regarding the program, meaning material could be at undeclared sites in the country.

Iran hasn’t said what work is ongoing at the sites, though it has said that the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran planned to issue a report about the damage done by the strikes.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, whose profile sharply rose during the war, also has kept open the possibility of talks with the U.S.

However, hard-liners within Iran are increasingly criticizing any effort at negotiations or cooperation with the West. Iran’s hard-line Kayhan newspaper, in a piece written by its Khamenei-appointed managing editor Hossein Shariatmadari, mocked any possible talks Tuesday by saying being a “traitor or stupid are two sides of the same coin.”

Shariatmadari’s newspaper on Saturday also suggested that the IAEA Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi, should be “tried and executed” if he visited Iran – something that drew immediate criticism from European nations and others.