Netanyahu’s own spies reject destruction claim
Israeli intelligence refused to back Netanyahu's claim that Iran's nuclear programme was destroyed, a new report reveals.
Israel’s own intelligence and military establishment refused a direct request from Benjamin Netanyahu’s office to declare Iran’s nuclear programme “completely destroyed,” Israeli media reported on Saturday, a year after a war that killed hundreds of Iranians and assassinated the country’s leading nuclear scientists in their homes.
Iran’s mission to the UN in Vienna dismissed Netanyahu’s destruction claim as “the Big Lie,” noting he has made similar unproven claims for more than 30 years. Nine of Iran’s ten most senior nuclear scientists, among them Fereydoon Abbasi, Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi and Abdolhamid Minouchehr, were killed simultaneously in the opening hours of the June 2025 war. By its end, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, Israeli strikes had killed 1,190 people in Iran, including 436 civilians.
According to Yedioth Ahronoth, Netanyahu’s office pressured security, intelligence and military officials, hours after the ceasefire, to sign a statement endorsing Donald Trump’s claim that the strikes had wiped out Iran’s nuclear sites. A senior intelligence official refused. “I cannot sign this,” he told his superior, warning the agencies lacked the information to support the claim and that signing it would wreck their credibility. Israel’s own satellite and drone surveillance, the paper reported, found the damage “significant, but not complete, and certainly did not amount to total destruction.” Netanyahu’s office and the agencies involved did not respond to the paper’s questions.
Brig. Gen. Moshe Edri, head of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, agreed to help draft a document backing the White House line after the Pentagon’s own internal assessment undercut it, but the senior scientists asked to approve the text refused to sign what they called “heavily distorted” wording. The compromise version conceded only that Fordow’s enrichment hall had been “rendered inoperable” and Iran’s programme set back “by many years,” stopping well short of Trump’s “completely destroyed.” The scientists added their own caveat: any gains would hold only if Iran was kept from regaining access to its nuclear material, because roughly 440kg of it was still unaccounted for.
That figure is the IAEA’s, not Iran’s. Its September 2025 report found Iran held 440.9kg of uranium enriched to 60% on the eve of the strikes, enough, Israeli scientists calculated, for about 11 warheads if it were ever enriched further and weaponised, which Iran has not done and denies intending to do. The agency says it cannot verify where the stockpile now is because Iran has blocked access to the damaged sites. A leaked US Defence Intelligence Agency assessment reached a similar conclusion within days of the war, putting the setback at three to six months, not the year Trump claimed; the Pentagon later revised that to one to two years. Real damage, on every account. Not destruction.
Netanyahu went on to tell Israeli television that Iran had “already obtained” a nuclear bomb, a claim his own political rivals Naftali Bennett and Gadi Eisenkot, no doves themselves, called a lie. A war sold on the promise of erasing an existential threat has left the man who ordered it unable to get his own spies to say it worked.
