Iran Insists on Rejecting Restrictions on Its Uranium Enrichment
Iran’s nuclear energy agency has rejected all restrictions on the country’s uranium enrichment. Iranian authorities emphasised that the demands from the United States (US) and Israel regarding limitations on uranium enrichment “will not come to pass”.
This assertion, as reported by AFP and Euronews on Friday (10 April 2026), was made by the head of Iran’s nuclear energy agency, Mohammad Eslami, in a statement quoted by Iran’s ISNA News Agency on Thursday (9 April) local time.
“The claims and demands of our enemies to limit Iran’s enrichment programme are merely wishes that will be buried,” Eslami stated.
The statement was issued ahead of negotiations scheduled for the weekend between the United States (US) and Iran, mediated by Pakistan.
“All conspiracies and actions of our enemies, including this brutal war, have yielded no results. Now, they are attempting to achieve something through negotiations,” Eslami remarked.
The issue of uranium enrichment has been a focal point in relations between Western countries and Iran for over two decades. The US and its allies accuse Tehran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons, but Iran has always insisted that its nuclear programme is solely for civilian purposes.
US President Donald Trump has insisted that “there will be no uranium enrichment” by Iran after the war. In a statement before the war erupted, he argued that Tehran was building nuclear weapons—a claim unsupported by the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog.
The joint US-Israeli attack on 28 February that ignited the war against Iran occurred while Washington and Tehran were engaged in negotiations covering Iran’s nuclear programme.
Subsequently, during the 12-day war between Iran and Israel in June 2025, Tel Aviv and Washington bombed Tehran’s nuclear facilities, claiming to have destroyed the country’s capability to conduct uranium enrichment.
Nevertheless, the whereabouts of hundreds of kilograms of highly enriched uranium belonging to Iran remain unknown following the bombing.
That enriched uranium supply is estimated to be buried under the rubble of the sites bombed by the US and Israel, with Trump suggesting that the US and Iran collaborate to “dig up and extract all the deeply buried nuclear material”.
Before the war broke out last year, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), estimated that Iran had enriched uranium to 60 per cent—far above the 3.67 per cent limit allowed under the 2025 nuclear agreement, which is now defunct.
Iran’s uranium enrichment level approaches the 90 per cent required to produce a nuclear bomb.