For more than two decades, Iran\u2019s nuclear programme has been subject to intense international scrutiny, sanctions and diplomatic negotiations.<\/p>\n
By contrast, while Israel is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons, an assertion it has consistently refused to deny or confirm, it faces little to almost no international pressure for transparency.<\/p>\n list of 3 items<\/span>end of list<\/span><\/section>\n Over the past 10 months, Israel and the United States have waged two wars on Iran, arguing without evidence that the country was on the verge of having the capacity to build a nuclear weapon. These wars \u2013 the 12-day conflict in June last year and the recent month of fighting this year \u2013 have killed more than 2,600 Iranians and plunged\u00a0the world into an unprecedented energy crisis.<\/p>\n This imbalance has prompted complaints by Iran of double standards, as well as by proponents of nuclear non-proliferation worldwide. The difference between the treatment of Iran and Israel is not only evident in international law frameworks such as the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), but also reflected in geopolitics and global power dynamics, observers say.<\/p>\n So, what do we know about Israel\u2019s nuclear arsenal, the scrutiny and debate around Iran\u2019s nuclear programme, and why critics argue a double standard is at play when it comes to the threat posed by these two longtime foes?<\/p>\n It is an \u201copen secret\u201d that Israel is the only country in the Middle East which possesses nuclear weapons, despite it maintaining a decades-long opacity about the issue, observers say.<\/p>\n When pressed on whether his country possessed nuclear capability or nuclear weapons during a 2018 exchange with former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: \u201cWe have always said that we won\u2019t be the first to introduce it, and we haven\u2019t introduced it \u2026 It\u2019s as good an answer as you will get.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite Israel\u2019s lack of transparency about its nuclear programme, experts say the origins of it date back to the 1950s under founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, when Israel began developing nuclear capabilities with foreign assistance, notably from France.<\/p>\n The Dimona nuclear facility in the Negev desert has long been suspected of producing plutonium for weapons. According to experts, Israel possesses an estimated 80 to 200 nuclear warheads, though exact figures remain unknown.<\/p>\n In 1986, Israel\u2019s policy of secrecy was dealt a serious blow when Mordechai Vanunu, a technician at the Dimona facility, disclosed information and photographs from the reactor to the United Kingdom\u2019s Sunday Times newspaper.<\/p>\n He was later abducted by Israeli agents, tried in secret and spent 18 years in prison.<\/p>\n Adding to the fog over its nuclear capabilities is Israel\u2019s refusal to sign the NPT, which came into force in 1970, meaning it is not subject to the same international inspections as member states.<\/p>\n The NPT is a global agreement designed to curb the spread of nuclear weapons, commit to nuclear disarmament, and encourage the peaceful use of nuclear energy. A total of 191 United Nations member states are signatories to the treaty, including Israel\u2019s longtime adversary, Iran.<\/p>\n Israel\u2019s policy serves multiple purposes, according to analyst Shawn Rostker.<\/p>\n \u201cThe logic is fairly straightforward: Ambiguity is meant to preserve deterrence while avoiding some of the diplomatic, legal and political costs that would come with an open declaration, especially given that Israel is not a party to the NPT and continues to sit outside that framework,\u201d Rostker, an Astra fellow with the Constellation Institute, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n The analyst says Israel is unlikely to join the NPT in the near future.<\/p>\n \u201cIsrael\u2019s position has been tied for decades to its regional security environment, and there is little sign that it sees strategic benefit in giving up ambiguity or joining the NPT,\u201d Rostker said.<\/p>\n \u201cA real shift would probably require a much broader regional security arrangement, potentially tied to a Middle East WMD-free zone or a major change in the threat environment, not outside pressure alone,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n Iran\u2019s nuclear programme began in the 1950s under former leader Reza Shah Pahlavi, with US support, but expanded significantly after the 1979 Islamic revolution.<\/p>\n Iran, which remains a signatory to the NPT, has consistently maintained that its nuclear programme is for civilian purposes only, such as energy production and medical use.<\/p>\n In 1974, it signed a comprehensive safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and in the decades since then, both under the former shah and under the Islamic Republic, it has been regularly monitored by the UN agency.<\/p>\n Iran also joined the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015 along with the US and other nations, under which Iran agreed to restrict the enrichment of uranium and to be subject to inspections by the IAEA.<\/p>\n Key provisions of that agreement included:<\/p>\n Also under the JCPOA, inspectors from the IAEA \u2013 who had already been in Iran monitoring its nuclear programme \u2013 began daily inspections of the country\u2019s facilities to ensure that Tehran stuck by its commitments.<\/p>\n It did, they found.<\/p>\n The US, under President Donald Trump, withdrew from the agreement in 2018, despite the IAEA saying Iran had complied with the agreement up to that point.<\/p>\n Iran nevertheless continued to adhere to its JCPOA commitments for one year after the US exited the deal, according to the IAEA, before restarting heightened levels of enrichment.<\/p>\n Indeed, the US argument for why Iran represents a nuclear weapons threat \u2013 that it holds 400kg of 60 percent enriched uranium \u2013 is based on an IAEA report from 2025, underscoring how the UN agency has far greater visibility into Iran\u2019s nuclear programme than the world has into Israel\u2019s. Uranium needs to be enriched to levels higher than 90 percent for it to become weapons-grade. The removal of this 60 percent-enriched uranium has been one of the US\u2019s key demands during talks with Iran.<\/p>\n While the US and Israel have targeted Iran\u2019s nuclear facilities during the 12-day war in 2025 and the most recent strikes this year and claim to have destroyed a large part of them, this map shows what we know of the positions of Iran\u2019s nuclear facilities up to this year:<\/p>\n While Israel and the US have claimed for some time that Iran is close to building nuclear weapons, they have not offered any meaningful proof.<\/p>\n In fact, in March 2025, Tulsi Gabbard, the US director of national intelligence, testified to Congress that the US \u201ccontinues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003\u201d.<\/p>\n Iran has long maintained that it has no plans to build a nuclear weapon. In 2003, then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in US-Israeli attacks on Tehran on February 28, publicly announced prohibiting the pursuit of such a weapon, saying it was against Islamic law.<\/p>\n After the US and Israel launched their latest war on Iran on February 28, Gabbard, in a new testimony before Congress, said the US intelligence community did not believe that Iran had resumed its nuclear programme after the bombings of June 2025.<\/p>\n Palestinian analyst Ahmed Najar is one of many experts who say there is \u201cclearly a double standard\u201d in how Israel\u2019s nuclear programme is treated compared with Iran\u2019s, arguing that politics rather than international norms is what drives this.<\/p>\n In his view, Israel has been granted an exemption from the global non-proliferation regime because of its role as a Western-aligned power in the Middle East, while Iran\u2019s status as a perceived \u201cfoe\u201d invites maximum pressure.<\/p>\n \u201cIn that sense, international norms are applied selectively \u2013 rigorously enforced in some cases, and quietly set aside in others.\u201d<\/p>\n Beyond the political double standard, Najar argues that Israel\u2019s longstanding policy of \u201cnuclear ambiguity\u201d raises deeper concerns about transparency amid the \u201copacity of Israel\u2019s nuclear doctrine itself\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is ambiguity not only around capability, but around thresholds for use \u2013 and that exists without the accountability mechanisms applied elsewhere,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n Najar said he is pessimistic about the prospects of any change to this approach, without a \u201cbroader transformation\u201d of international politics and power dynamics.<\/p>\n \u201cAs long as strategic interests take precedence over consistent application of international law, Israel\u2019s nuclear posture is likely to remain largely shielded from scrutiny,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For more than two decades, Iran\u2019s nuclear programme has been subject to intense international scrutiny, sanctions and diplomatic negotiations. By contrast, while Israel is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons, an assertion it has consistently refused to deny or confirm, it faces little to almost no international pressure for transparency. Recommended Stories list of 3 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19030,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-explained"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19029\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Recommended Stories <\/h2>\n
What do we know about Israel\u2019s nuclear weapons?<\/h2>\n
![\"INTERACTIVE-](\"https:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/INTERACTIVE-NPT.png?w=770&resize=770%2C770&quality=80\")
<\/p>\nWhat do we know about Iran\u2019s nuclear programme?<\/h2>\n
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![\"Iran](\"https:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/INTERACTIVE-Irans-nuclear-and-military-facilities-FEB24-2026-1772110699.png?w=770&resize=770%2C962&quality=80\")
<\/p>\nWhat proof is there that Iran has the capacity to build nuclear weapons?<\/h2>\n
Are different standards being applied to Israel and Iran over nuclear weapons?<\/h2>\n
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