US-Israel Airstrikes on Iran

US-Israel Airstrikes on Iran: Why the War Didn't End the Nuclear Problem

The February 28, 2026 strikes killed Iran's supreme leader and hit Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan — but 440.9 kg of near-weapons-grade uranium and Iran's grip on the Strait of Hormuz survived.

Four months and nine days after 200 Israeli fighter jets and US bombers opened Operation Epic Fury over Tehran on February 28, 2026, the war's most consequential legacy is not the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — it is the 440.9 kilograms of 60%-enriched uranium the International Atomic Energy Agency says still sits, unverified, somewhere inside Iran. Washington destroyed a supreme leader, degraded a missile industry, and shattered a decade of nuclear diplomacy, but it did not destroy the stockpile that started the war — and the June 17 Versailles memorandum concedes as much. The thesis is uncomfortable: the United States traded a verifiable enrichment cap for a status-quo pause it cannot police, and the leverage that once belonged to the JCPOA now belongs to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

What the strikes actually did

At about 7:00 a.m. Iran time on February 28, roughly 200 Israeli aircraft executed what the IDF called "the largest ever military flyover" in its history, hitting some 500 targets alongside US precision munitions and Tomahawks, according to the BBC. Within hours a strike on Khamenei's Tehran compound killed the 86-year-old cleric, his daughter and a grandchild; Iranian state media confirmed his death by day's end. US Central Command chief Gen. Brad Cooper later told the House Armed Services Committee that more than 85% of Iran's ballistic-missile, drone and naval defense-industrial base had been "damaged or destroyed," per Al Jazeera.

Iran's response was faster and broader than US planners assumed. Within 12 hours the IRGC had struck Al Udeid in Qatar, Al-Salem in Kuwait, Al-Dhafra in the UAE and the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, according to NPR. Six US service members were killed and 18 wounded in the opening exchanges. By March 11 the UN Security Council had adopted Resolution 2817 (2026) 13-0-2 — a Bahrain-drafted, Gulf-backed text condemning Iran's attacks on seven neighbours; a Russian counter-draft that would have censured the US and Israel failed. That vote is the single clearest measure of who won the diplomatic first round: the Gulf states, not Tehran.

The physical damage is now largely visible. BBC Verify analysis of a quarter-million satellite images unclassified in July documented destruction across Bushehr and Isfahan — dockyards, missile launchers, ammunition storage, more than 60 structures at a single base south of Isfahan. But IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi has publicly assessed that Iran's nuclear program was set back only "by a matter of months," according to the Council on Foreign Relations conflict tracker. That is the disconnect at the heart of the story.

The stockpile problem the deal cannot solve

The IAEA's most recent Board of Governors report is the primary document that anchors the entire post-war balance. It states — in language the Agency almost never uses — that the 440.9 kg of uranium enriched to 60% U-235 that Iran had accumulated by June 13, 2025 "remains in Iran without the Agency being able to verify it since mid-June 2025" and describes this as "a matter of serious concern."

"The re-establishment of the current status of such inventories, based on Iran's reports and Agency verification, needs urgently to be addressed." — IAEA Report GOV/2025/65, on Iran's HEU and LEU stockpiles

Under a September 9, 2025 Cairo agreement between Grossi and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, Iran committed to a "special report" on affected facilities. As of the IAEA's later filings, that report has not arrived. The Agency now formally cannot verify whether Iran has suspended enrichment, the size of its stockpile, or its centrifuge inventory. Continuity of knowledge is broken. That is the environment in which the Trump administration negotiated a settlement — one where the object of the negotiation cannot be counted.

The June 17 Memorandum of Understanding, signed by Trump and President Masoud Pezeshkian at the Palace of Versailles under Emmanuel Macron's hosting, has 14 points and, per the BBC, one page and a half of text. It commits Iran only to "downblend" its stockpile on-site under IAEA supervision — not to ship it abroad, as the US had originally demanded. It defers every hard question to a 60-day follow-on window. Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader, reportedly issued a directive that no uranium leaves the country, per Al Jazeera. Trump got a signature; Iran kept the material.

The domestic legal aftermath

Congressional Republicans have shielded the operation, but by narrower margins each vote. On June 3, 2026 the House passed H.Con.Res.86 — directing the president to withdraw US forces from hostilities with Iran under Section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution — by 215 to 208, with four Republicans crossing over. The companion Senate resolution, sponsored by Cory Booker, Tim Kaine, Adam Schiff and Chris Murphy, has been blocked four times on procedural votes, most recently 52-47. Senator Jack Reed's floor speech was blunt: the war was "ill-conceived," pursued "without clear objectives," and Trump's threshold for ending it depends on "his own morality."

The text of S.J.Res.118 matters as an official finding: Congress states on the record that it "has not declared war upon Iran… nor enacted a specific statutory authorization for the use of military force," and that the January–February 2026 buildup constituted "the largest military buildup in the Middle East since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003." That is a primary-source rebuke from the co-equal branch — one the courts and future administrations will read.

The economic bill, and who is paying

The war's fiscal footprint is now measurable. Brent crude peaked near $120/barrel in mid-May; US gasoline hit $4.56/gallon at the pump, per NPR, citing AAA. The World Bank cut its 2026 global growth forecast to 2.5%, the lowest since the pandemic year. IMF revisions clipped Qatar's growth by nearly 16 points after Iranian drones targeted the Ras Laffan LNG hub. Middle East producers had to cut crude output by more than 11 million barrels/day in May relative to prewar levels, per the US Energy Information Administration cited in the same NPR analysis.

The Brookings Institution has flagged the second-order problem that outlasts any ceasefire: the IRGC has been charging safe-passage tolls — reportedly around $1 per barrel, or roughly $2 million per Very Large Crude Carrier transit. The June 17 MoU commits Iran only to "best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge for 60 days," and Iran's lead negotiator Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf has stated publicly that the strait "will never go back to the way it was before the war," per the BBC. A precedent has been set: a littoral state can extract rents from an international waterway, and the world's largest navy signed a document that does not durably reverse it. Watch Malacca. Watch Bab el-Mandeb.

Beneficiaries and losers are now visible. Saudi Aramco reported a 26% first-quarter earnings jump; US LNG exporters and Qatar's long-term contract book both consolidated market share, per Al Jazeera. India, Japan and Korea absorbed the sharpest import-price shocks. Germany's Chancellor Friedrich Merz publicly opposed Trump's Iran ultimatum — a rare open transatlantic split — drawing a direct rebuke from Trump on Truth Social, per NPR.

The succession that isn't

The most under-analysed variable is the man now formally atop the Iranian state. Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, was named by the Assembly of Experts on March 8, 2026 despite Trump's public objection that he was "unacceptable." He has not appeared in public since — not at his own installation, not at his father's July 5 funeral processions in Tehran. The BBC reported that his three brothers attended the ceremony while he was represented only by written statements. Analysts openly speculate he was wounded on February 28 or is in permanent hiding under Israeli assassination threat; the IDF has publicly said it will "continue to pursue every successor."

That vacuum matters. The IRGC — not the supreme leader's office — is running the Strait of Hormuz, dictating terms of maritime toll enforcement, and driving retaliatory strikes on US bases. Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute told Al Jazeera that Iran now operates a doctrine of proportional but "swift and harsh" response to any US strike, "because otherwise, a new normal is established." Every ceasefire violation since June 17 — the drone hit on the MV Ever Lovely on June 25, the US retaliatory strikes on ten Iranian coastal targets, the IRGC's counter-strikes on Kuwait and Bahrain — confirms that pattern. The MoU is a document; the operational reality is a rolling low-intensity war Iran can restart at cargo-ship speed.

Diplomat View

The prevailing Washington narrative — that Operation Epic Fury broke Iran's nuclear ambition and forced it to the table — is half right and dangerously packaged. The strikes did decapitate a regime and gut a missile-industrial base. They did not destroy 440.9 kg of near-weapons-grade uranium, they did not verify anything, and they did not extract the concession Trump publicly named as his primary objective: physical removal of the fissile material. The Versailles MoU is best understood as a pause the IRGC accepted because reconstitution takes time and oil rents help pay for it — not as a strategic defeat. Iran gained a documented US commitment to lift UNSC sanctions and IAEA Board resolutions in an agreed schedule, and a $300bn reconstruction framework that, though vague, legitimises normalisation.

The forecast: absent a verifiable disposition of the 60% stockpile inside the current 60-day window — expiring around August 16, 2026 — either Trump extends the pause and accepts a de facto threshold-state Iran, or he restarts strikes and the House War Powers coalition grows. My call is the former, with a 65% probability, contingent on IRGC restraint in Hormuz. What would falsify this: any Iranian move to weaponise or expel IAEA inspectors, an Israeli unilateral strike Trump does not authorise, or Mojtaba Khamenei surfacing publicly and repudiating the MoU. Any one of those flips the base case to renewed war within 30 days.

The uncomfortable historical parallel is not 1981's Osirak. It is 1994's Agreed Framework with North Korea — a bilateral pact that froze declared facilities, deferred verification, and produced a nuclear-armed state within a decade. The question is not whether Iran retains a nuclear option after Operation Epic Fury; it is whether the current administration has traded away the tools to detect when Tehran exercises it.

What to watch next

• August 16, 2026 — statutory expiry of the 60-day MoU negotiating window unless mutually extended; watch for IAEA access to Fordow and Natanz debris.
• September 2026 — IAEA Board of Governors quarterly session, first opportunity for a formal non-compliance finding since the strikes.
• October 18, 2026 — remaining nuclear provisions of UNSC Resolution 2231 expire unless the Council acts; the sunset clause the JCPOA architects wrote into international law now becomes the diplomatic pivot.
• US Senate: a fifth War Powers vote is expected before recess; a 51-vote flip would force a presidential veto and reset the domestic-legal calculus.

Track Global Politics coverage for the next inflection point in Iran's post-strike trajectory.