New construction and repairs at an Iranian compound previously targeted by Israel suggest Tehran may be moving beyond clearing war damage toward restoring operations at a site linked to nuclear weapons research, according to a Washington-based research institute.
The Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) said Saturday that satellite imagery showed repairs to what appeared to be a water tank and the addition of a small building nearby at the Minzadayi compound, northeast of Tehran.
The findings add to an assessment published Tuesday in which the institute identified unusually heavy vehicle traffic and earth-moving activity at the heavily secured site, which Israeli aircraft struck on March 3.
The latest observations suggest Iran is seeking “not just to clean up the site” but to resume regular activities there, the institute said in a post on X.
Iran has consistently denied seeking nuclear weapons, maintaining that its nuclear program is intended for peaceful purposes.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has said it has no credible indication of a coordinated Iranian nuclear weapons program, although it has repeatedly raised concerns about Tehran's uranium enrichment and unresolved questions over past nuclear activities.
The original ISIS report, based on high-resolution satellite images taken in September and October, documented passenger vehicles and trucks returning to the compound following extensive work to remove rubble and repair damage from the Israeli attack.
Researchers also identified continued excavation at a section of the compound where the March strikes had left several craters, apparently above underground structures.
The institute said the activity could indicate an attempt to restore capabilities associated with nuclear weapons development. But the images do not establish what work, if any, has resumed inside the compound.
Israel identified Minzadayi as a covert nuclear weapons development facility during the war, saying scientists there had been working on a component of a nuclear weapons system. The institute's assessment of the site's earlier purpose relies partly on those Israeli military claims, which have not been independently verified.
The US and Israel launched their military campaign against Iran on February 28, two days after indirect nuclear negotiations in Geneva that Omani mediators said had made progress. Further technical talks had been planned before the attacks began.
Washington and Tehran remain divided over the future of Iran's nuclear program. The Trump administration is demanding substantial reductions in Iran's enrichment capacity, while Tehran insists it will not surrender its right to enrich uranium.
On Saturday, the Kremlin said Russian President Vladimir Putin had conveyed Tehran's position on a possible settlement of the war to President Donald Trump during a phone call Friday, following consultations with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.
Moscow disclosed neither the details of Iran's position nor Trump's response.
The institute's findings raise the possibility that Iran is rebuilding infrastructure damaged in the war, but leave unanswered the more consequential question of whether any nuclear weapons-related research has resumed.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday that Iran had failed to take advantage of repeated opportunities to reach an agreement with Washington over its nuclear program, while also saying Tehran had “lost complete control” of the Strait of Hormuz.
Speaking during a visit to Athens, Rubio said oil flows through the strait had returned to nearly their prewar level.
“The Strait of Hormuz is open. There’s almost as much oil flowing out now as there was before this conflict began,” Rubio said. “So they’ve lost complete control of the Strait.”
He also described Iran’s economy as being in “total and complete freefall” under US sanctions.
Rubio said Washington’s position on Iran’s nuclear program remained unchanged.
“Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, simple, period, end of story,” he said. “Anything they agree to that would be acceptable to the United States has to be something that ensures that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.”
Tehran responds to Vance on enrichment
Later on Wednesday, a senior Iranian official told Reuters that Tehran would never give up what it regards as its right to enrich uranium, responding to nuclear demands set out by US Vice President JD Vance.
“There have been no negotiations between Iran and the US about Tehran’s nuclear program,” the official said, describing Vance’s comments as American “ideas and requests.”
The official said US recognition of Iran’s right to enrichment was a “red line” and that Tehran would “never give up its right to enrich,” although the level and other details of enrichment could be discussed later.
The official also said Washington must first meet Tehran’s conditions before the nuclear issue could be discussed and said US proposals on enrichment were inconsistent with Iran’s demands.
IRGC adviser says Hormuz remains closed
Also on Wednesday, Mohammad Reza Naghdi, a senior adviser to the commander-in-chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, disputed Washington’s account of the Strait of Hormuz.
“The Strait of Hormuz is closed, and the armed forces have full control over it,” Naghdi said. “This situation will continue until Iran’s legitimate demands are met.”
He said Iranian forces would block what he described as unauthorized routes through the waterway.
Naghdi also said limits on the range of Iranian weapons were based on policy rather than technical constraints.
“Whenever the supreme leader gives authorization, we will increase the range of our weapons according to the needs of the battlefield,” he said.
Trump says decision coming ‘pretty soon’
The exchanges followed remarks by President Donald Trump on Tuesday night that the United States still had to decide how to “finish up” with Iran.
“We have to finish up, and it's only a question of which way we want to do it: the nice way or the not-so-nice way,” Trump said at an Anduril Industries event in Maryland. “You will find out pretty soon.”
Trump said the United States was doing “extremely well” against Iran and said Tehran’s military had been severely weakened.
“They have no military in sight. The whole place is shut,” he said.
“They were the bully of the Middle East. They're not so much the bully anymore.”
Vance calls for enrichment cuts
Vance had told Reuters in an interview that Iran would need to meaningfully reduce its uranium enrichment capacity to meet US demands and end the war.
“If you don't want a nuclear weapon, then why do you need 60% enriched fuel?” Vance said. “If you want to show commitment to not building a nuclear weapon, don't build highly enriched fuel.”
“I think if they want to show a commitment to not building a nuclear weapon, they would do something meaningful on their enrichment capacity,” he added.
Vance said Washington remained open to an agreement but wanted concrete action from Tehran.
“We're not going to trade words for actions,” he said.
He also said the US had been communicating with President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi but remained uncertain about how decisions were being made within Iran’s political system.
Iran is reviewing Washington’s response to a seven-day proposal sent through intermediaries, a senior foreign ministry official said on Sunday, as other officials offered differing assessments of whether further negotiations with the United States were needed.
Iran reviews US response
Iran’s seven-day proposal, outlined by Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in New York, was sent to Washington through intermediaries and the United States subsequently provided its views on the plan, Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi said Sunday.
“The proposal that Mr. Araghchi outlined in New York, Iran’s seven-day plan, was sent to the United States through intermediaries, and they provided their views on the plan,” Gharibabadi said.
The US response is being reviewed inside Iran and Tehran will communicate its final position through the appropriate channel once that process is complete, Gharibabadi said. Iran was also maintaining readiness for “other scenarios,” he added.
Parliament deputy speaker Hamid-Reza Haji Babaei separately said negotiations with Washington were taking place, while expressing little confidence that they would ultimately produce an understanding.
“Negotiations with the United States are in fact underway now,” Haji Babaei said.
Alaeddin Boroujerdi, a member of parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, said US proposals had recently been conveyed through Qatar, although he did not know their details.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said US proposals remained focused on the nuclear issue and Iran had already responded. He also rejected President Donald Trump’s remark that Washington did not know who represented Iran in negotiations, saying a six-member committee under the Supreme National Security Council was overseeing the process.
Lawmakers differ on further talks
Despite the exchanges, parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee spokesman Hassan Ghashghavi said there were no unresolved substantive issues requiring new negotiations.
“We are, in my view, at a post-negotiations stage both on the Strait of Hormuz and on the conditions,” Ghashghavi said.
Another committee member, Ebrahim Rezaei, said Iran would not retreat from its conditions and presented diplomacy and military pressure as the alternatives facing Washington.
“The Americans must either surrender to our diplomats or surrender to Iran’s missiles. We have no other proposal for them,” Rezaei said.
Nuclear debate continues as rial falls
The nuclear program remained part of the diplomatic debate. Baghaei said Iran remained bound by its obligations under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons for as long as it remained a member.
Parliament will consider a possible withdrawal from the NPT while maintaining uranium enrichment, parliament board member Alireza Salimi said.
Iran is also considering a Russian offer to take custody of its uranium enriched to 60%, with a final decision to be based on its national interests, Baghaei said.
The diplomatic maneuvering coincided with further pressure on Iran’s currency, with the US dollar rising above 2.7 million rials on the free market on Sunday.
The statements put the focus on Tehran’s review of Washington’s response, with Iranian officials differing over whether the next step requires further negotiations or a decision on proposals already exchanged.
Iran has spent two decades keeping al-Qaeda close as a partner it can deny, and could turn to it if the war with the United States escalates, a counterterrorism expert told Iran International. With Hezbollah and Hamas weakened, she said, it is the card Tehran has left.
Sara Harmouch, chief executive of H9 Defense and an adjunct professor at George Washington University, said the relationship is no longer a historical footnote.
"Who is better to rise as a secret proxy for Iran than al-Qaeda?" she said. "Al-Qaeda keeps a low profile and continues to maintain plausible deniability."
Intelligence circulating in the Middle East and among the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, which US and Western officials have not confirmed, suggests that Saif al-Adel, al-Qaeda's de facto leader, who has long been based in Iran, is preparing attacks if the war widens, Harmouch said. That would suit both sides, she said: Iran could deny involvement, and al-Qaeda could return to the world stage against Western interests.
"It's all possible, and it's not far-fetched," she said. Iran, she added, had helped with the operations, funding and logistics of the September 11 attacks. "So why wouldn't they now, especially if they're in such a difficult situation with the war?"
The 9/11 Commission found that Iran allowed several of the hijackers to transit its territory but found no evidence that Tehran knew of the plot. A US federal court later found Iran liable in a civil case brought by victims' families, a judgment Iran did not contest.
'Pragmatism always trumps ideology'
Washington, Harmouch argued, still treats the rivalry between Sunni and Shia Islam as a wall. In 2024 she wrote that al-Qaeda was becoming "Iran's ace in the hole," with Adel at the center. Western outlets turned the piece down, she said, because editors would not accept cooperation across the sectarian line.
"Someone who has not been to the region at all felt compelled to tell me, oh, but there's a Sunni-Shia divide," she said.
She made the argument instead on the podcast of Michael Morell, a former acting director of the CIA. Two years later, she said, the same pattern is being reported as news: al-Qaeda in Yemen has stopped fighting the Houthis, and the cooperation has spread to al-Shabaab in Somalia.
"Pragmatism always trumps ideology," she said.
As evidence of that shift, Harmouch pointed to a drone unit the Houthis helped al-Qaeda set up, a joint meeting of al-Qaeda in Yemen, al-Shabaab and the Houthis, and a claim that the Houthis paid al-Qaeda $65,000 in recent months for an attack carried out on their behalf.
Al-Qaeda has publicly rejected UN findings that it cooperates with the Houthis and has stepped up anti-Houthi propaganda, which she read as cover rather than a break.
The leader who avoids the camera
Adel, she said, is why the silence in Yemen was predictable. Al-Qaeda has never publicly named him leader because he is in Iran, and unlike Osama bin Laden he avoids the camera. A 52-minute al-Qaeda video released around this year's September 11 anniversary used old footage of Hamza bin Laden and quoted Adel's book without showing him. In that book, she said, the word "deception" appears 99 times.
In her account, the relationship took shape after 2001, when al-Qaeda figures fled Afghanistan for Iran. Tehran detained some and sent others home. It kept Adel, under what former CIA director George Tenet later called a loose house arrest. Adel stayed close to Qassem Soleimani, the Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force commander, and, Harmouch said, told him: "We are partners. We're not enemies. We are partners in changing the world."
She traced episodes that, she said, show the house arrest was never a cage: the 2003 Riyadh bombings, which US officials said were directed in part from Iran; a 2013 plot to derail a train between Toronto and New York, which Canadian police said had direction from al-Qaeda elements in Iran; and, after Abu Musab al-Zarqawi began killing Shia in Iraq, a turn from hospitality to coercion, including the holding of members of bin Laden's family.
In a 2007 letter, bin Laden called Iran "our main artery for funds, personnel, and communications" and warned against attacking it. In 2008, she said, Ayman al-Zawahiri praised the Revolutionary Guards for strengthening al-Qaeda in Yemen.
In Syria, she said, the relationship worked like a proxy arrangement. Iran released Muhsin al-Fadhli, who went on to move money and fighters into the Syrian war. In 2015 it freed Abu Khayr al-Masri and other senior figures in a prisoner exchange; Harmouch said the Quds Force used them to split the forces of Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, now Syria's president, Ahmad al-Sharaa.
Abu Muhammad al-Masri, al-Qaeda's second in command, remained in Iran until Israeli agents killed him in Tehran in 2020. The US Treasury has since sanctioned Iranian-based networks for supporting al-Qaeda.
After Zawahiri was killed in 2022, Adel's rise closed the circle, she said. Since the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, he has told affiliates to stop hitting Iran's proxies. What unites them, in his words as she rendered them, is greater than what unites their enemies: one God, one qibla, the direction of prayer, and one political goal. His statements and Tehran's have lined up on the Red Sea, on protests at American universities, and on Afghanistan.
'There is no winning'
A deal, or a harder US campaign, would not end the problem, Harmouch said. Iran fights by attrition and will absorb losses the United States will not, and when it cannot control what happens outside its borders, it turns on its own population.
The cells inside the United States that are often cited as a threat have not produced a directed attack, she said. They may not exist, or Tehran may be holding them as leverage that disappears once used.
The likelier diversion, in her view, is an al-Qaeda attack Iran can disown, buying time to rebuild. A nuclear announcement is possible, she said, but less necessary since Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz showed what it could do to American gasoline prices.
"I don't think there is winning a war against Iran," she said. "As long as it's still in the fight, it is winning."
Tehran is making a “total miscalculation” if it believes the US midterm elections will constrain President Donald Trump’s actions against Iran, former senior US official Morgan Ortagus told Iran International.
Ortagus pointed to Trump’s first term, when Democrats took control of the House in the 2018 midterms but his administration continued its “maximum pressure” campaign against Tehran and ordered the 2020 killing of Qasem Soleimani.
“Any fallacy that they have that President Trump is going to limit his decision-making authority… based off a change in the Congress is a miscalculation by a regime who still fundamentally does not understand this president.”
Congressional debate over war powers was “healthy for our democracy,” Ortagus said, but did not change the president’s authority “to take any action against Iran that he deems necessary for the safety and the security of the American people.”
Ortagus, who held senior roles in both Trump administrations, said the United States has been in a conflict with the Islamic Republic “not for seven months, but for 47 years,” and argued that economic pressure alone would not have prevented the current military confrontation.
She described Trump’s first-term maximum pressure campaign as “incredibly effective,” but said it was interrupted during Joe Biden’s presidency and has amounted to less than four years in total.
“Sanctions are not a silver bullet,” she said. “Sanctions are a tactic. They’re a way in which you pursue a larger strategy.”
That strategy, she said, should prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, cut funding to its proxy groups and stop Tehran from becoming “the next North Korea,” with missiles capable of threatening US bases, regional states and the American homeland.
Ortagus said Trump ordered military action beginning in June last year because Iran was “intransigent” in negotiations and “weeks away from getting a nuclear weapon.” The president had given Tehran a deadline, she said, and Iranian leaders may have believed he was bluffing.
“They learned pretty quickly that he wasn’t.”
Asked whether the campaign would have happened without a closely aligned Israeli government, Ortagus said it would have. Israeli operations had “complemented” US action, she said, but “these have been American decisions and American decisions alone.”
She cited Trump’s decision to order the killing of Soleimani in 2020 as an example of an action he took “by himself.”
On diplomacy, Ortagus said Trump had “always… extended the hand of diplomacy” during both administrations.
“It’s the regime that keeps rejecting that hand.”
She was skeptical that an agreement signed with Iranian officials in New York would hold if the real decision-makers remained in Tehran, echoing Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s doubts about the authority of Iran’s UN delegation.
“What you have to do is to make the thugs in the IRGC understand that everything, their livelihoods, everything that they possess, is going to be put at risk,” Ortagus said.
Trust was not the issue, she added. The question was what mechanisms Washington would establish “so they know… if you backtrack on this, there actually will be a consequence.”
She said she did not see how any future arrangement could work “without some sort of American verification process.”
Hezbollah and Lebanon
Ortagus rejected the argument that Hezbollah should be accepted as part of Lebanon’s social and political fabric.
“Bullshit,” she said.
She said the group was led by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, had been “indoctrinated, trained, equipped and brainwashed” by Tehran and had dragged Lebanon into “perpetual war,” with Shia communities among the main victims.
President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam had been “very clear,” she said, that Hezbollah must be disarmed and that Lebanon cannot have “a parallel state within a state.”
Dismantling that structure would take time, Ortagus added.
“It wasn’t created overnight, and it won’t be expunged overnight.”
Ortagus said the Abraham Accords had endured the turmoil since October 7, pointing to a meeting of Accords countries on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly this week.
By contrast, she said a Mecca-centered regional alignment “looks pretty weak right now,” after Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia, including toward holy sites, drew no meaningful response from its signatories.
“Anybody who does that and says they speak in the name of Islam are the worst hypocrites imaginable,” she said.
She declined to discuss current private exchanges between Riyadh and Washington but warned against seeking security through accommodation with Tehran.
“Pacifying this regime is not going to protect you in the long run,” she said. “It will buy you time. It might be a temporary salve, but it won’t heal the wound.”
Ortagus also described the current blockade of Iran as a harder form of enforcement than previous sanctions.
“Nothing’s coming in, and nothing’s going out.”
Asked about the broader US endgame, she listed four goals: preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon; curbing its ballistic missiles, drones and conventional arms; cutting funding to proxy groups; and supporting the Iranian people.
A final conversation about Iran
Ortagus closed the interview by recounting an unpublished story about the late Senator Lindsey Graham.
In January, she said, she had “Make Iran Great Again” hats overnighted to Graham at Mar-a-Lago so he could give one to Trump on the golf course.
She said she spoke to Graham an hour or two before his death, and that their last conversation was about Iran.
“He never stopped believing in the people of Iran,” she said.
Iranian hardliners have intensified attacks on President Masoud Pezeshkian after he signalled nuclear flexibility and backed negotiations with Washington in a Fox News interview.
Conservative officials and media outlets had largely welcomed Pezeshkian’s speech to the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, but his comments to Fox News a day later provoked a sharp backlash from hardliners.
Pezeshkian said Iran was prepared to reduce its level of uranium enrichment, dilute its existing stockpile of uranium enriched to 60% and allow international verification as part of efforts to ease tensions over its nuclear program.
He also said Tehran wanted a possible agreement before the US midterm elections in November and denied that Iran had a plan to assassinate US President Donald Trump.
The contrasting reactions underscored a problem confronting Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi: declarations of defiance can command broad support within Iran’s political establishment, but the concessions involved in actually reaching an agreement with Washington are proving considerably more contentious.
“Mr. Pezeshkian, don't spout nonsense about nuclear matters and uranium!” wrote hardline activist Mohammad-Hossein Chavoshi.
“We supported you when you spoke the truth, and we'll do it again; but if you step out of line, we'll deal with you accordingly. We will not give up the nuclear issue.”
But some defended Pezeshkian’s position.
“Did he say we should abandon the nuclear program?” one user wrote. “He is talking about 60% enrichment. Should we have constant war, remain under siege and have no money?
“Go to a large pharmacy and see what the shortage of medicine is like, not to mention the state of businesses and the market. Nobody is saying we should surrender. We can move forward thoughtfully.”
Araghchi’s plan
The backlash has not been confined to Pezeshkian. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has faced sustained attacks from hardliners since presenting an Iranian proposal to the US through intermediaries on Tuesday.
The proposal sets out a phased, one-week process for implementing commitments, after which direct or indirect talks on a broader agreement could resume, according to Araghchi.
He said at a press conference on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly that Iran was ready to begin implementing the plan as soon as Washington agreed to it and that negotiations on the nuclear issue would resume after the Strait of Hormuz was reopened at the end of the seventh day.
According to Araghchi, one of the conditions is US agreement on a maritime passage arrangement through the Strait of Hormuz that has been agreed between Iran and Oman.
Although Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, confirmed in a television interview on Saturday that Araghchi had been authorized to convey Iran’s conditions to the US through intermediaries in New York, criticism of the foreign minister has continued.
On Wednesday, hardline parliamentarian Amir-Hossein Sabeti said he had registered an impeachment motion against Araghchi through parliament’s system.
Warnings of wider conflict
At the same time, political and military figures have stepped up warnings of escalation if US pressure continues.
Ahmad Alamolhoda, the Friday prayer leader in Mashhad, said Friday that Iran had new weapons that would be used in the event of another US attack. He said Iran could expand the geographical range of attacks against US forces as far as the Indian Ocean.
IRGC spokesman Hossein Mohebbi similarly said Iran was prepared to enter new stages of confrontation with the US and could respond to another attack by “changing the geography of the conflict, using new equipment and weapons, and selecting different targets.”
The warnings have increasingly extended to neighboring countries as restrictions on Iranian aviation have tightened. Iranian flights to Najaf, Iraq, were cancelled Friday, further narrowing the country’s remaining international connections.
Rezaei warned regional countries earlier this week that if they barred Iranian flights in cooperation with Washington, flights from their own airports could also be stopped.
Mohammad Mokhber, an adviser and aide to Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, sharpened that warning Friday.
“Flights in the region are either free for everyone or for no one,” he wrote on X. “If Iran is unable to fly and receive airport services, no country in the region will have this possibility either.”
The competing messages highlight the difficulty facing Tehran as contacts with Washington resume: Pezeshkian and Araghchi are outlining the concessions and sequencing that a negotiated settlement could require, while hardline political and security figures emphasize Iran’s ability to widen the confrontation.
