A spokesman for Iran’s nuclear agency fired back at IAEA criticism of their refusal to provide access to a certain site, saying that the nuclear agency is allowed to decide on requests for access, and that they believe IAEA requests should have a legal basis.
That’s definitely not how the IAEA has been treating this process, as they seek access on the flimsiest pretext, and act shocked on the rare occasions when they get rebuffed. This current situation is a perfect example of that.
The site in question was one Israel accused of being an atomic warehouse, and which Iran says was only ever a carpet cleaner. Iran gave the IAEA access to the site in early 2019, and while the IAEA claimed to have detected trivial numbers of raw uranium particles, there was nothing indicating anything was enriched or processed.
The fact that the IAEA basically didn’t find anything means they still have questions, but from the Iranian perspective, if there is nothing to find that means the IAEA is just going to keep poking around forever, and has no basis to believe they’d find anything, beyond Israel saying it was there.
Having the IAEA investigate forever is just the sort of thing Israel would like, and the IAEA wants to show they are “aggressive” by continuing to push the issue. Since Iran already gave them access once and it didn’t solve anything, they clearly believe giving them more access will only encourage them.
The JCPOA is dead, Trump and the feckless Europeans made sure of that.
Why wouldn’t Iran just tell the IAEA to get out of their country until the rest of the word honors the deal? In the meantime the IAEA can head to Israel where they’ll not only be able to detect “trivial numbers of raw uranium particles”, they’ll find actual nukes.