US President Donald Trump has rejected a cautious early assessment by his own Pentagon on damage to Iranian nuclear sites and Democrats have doubted the success of air strikes, as Iran policy increasingly divides Washington.
"(The pilots) knew the Success was LEGENDARY, and then, two days later, they started reading Fake News by CNN and The Failing New York Times," Trump posted on social media on Wednesday.
He linked the success of the strikes to his own diplomatic prowess, hitting back at news outlets which published a leaked preliminary assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency saying the air strikes only set Iran's nuclear program by months.
Trump said a press conference on the attacks' impact would prove "irrefutable."
Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared to acknowledge the report's veracity but said leakers had "an agenda."
"I would say that story’s a false story, and it’s one that really shouldn’t be re-reported because it doesn’t accurately reflect what’s happening," Rubio told Politico.
The spirited defense came after Trump rounded on Republican critics of his decision to attack without Congressional authorization.
Sidelined Democrats clap back
As the nuclear attack unfolded, the Trump administration briefed Capitol Hill majority leaders from his own Republican Party but not Democrats.
The president's sharing of intelligence along party lines, if confirmed, would break with precedent of most of the recent decades where the commander-in-chief shared information on bipartisan lines.
Lawmakers from the minority criticized the move and wondered aloud what the strikes had accomplished.
"Iran’s highly enriched uranium could be moved in as little as 10 carloads," Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia wrote on X.
"Do we really have confidence we know where this is? Do we really have confidence it wasn’t moved before our strikes?"
During two months of US-Iran talks, Democrats had largely remained silently supportive of Trump's diplomatic effort to end Iran's nuclear ambitions.
Democratic Senator Michael Bennett of Colorado accused the Trump administration of withholding classified information on Iran from Congress.
"The nation's intelligence agency leadership must attend tomorrow's Senate briefing in addition to Secretaries Hegseth and Rubio," he posted on X.
Early DIA intelligence assessments suggested the US attacks may have only delayed Iran’s nuclear program by a few months, falling short of the administration’s claims of long-term disruption.
President Trump and senior administration officials have rejected that conclusion.
"It is a manmade statement and if you read the document, the document said it could be severely damaged, but they did not take that. They said it could be limited or it could be very severe. You did not choose to put that, because it was soon after," Trump told reporters at a NATO summit in The Hague on Wednesday.
"Since then, we collected additional and we talked to the people who have seen the site, and the site is obliterated, and we think everything nuclear is down there."
Trump said Israel sent agents to Iran’s bombed nuclear sites to confirm their “total obliteration”.
“Israel is doing a report on it now, I understand, and I was told that they said it was total obliteration,” Trump told reporters.
“Iran’s nuclear program had been set back basically decades… It’s gone for years.”
The White House on Wednesday sent to reporters a statement by the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) that said American strikes on Fordow "destroyed the site's critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility inoperable."
The move raised eyebrows as the Israeli government had not yet released the statement. However, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, on behalf of the IAEC, officially published the assessment an hour later.
"We assess that the American strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, combined with Israeli strikes on other elements of Iran's military nuclear program, has set back Iran's ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years," the statement read.
"The achievement can continue indefinitely if Iran does not get access to nuclear material."
White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt also denied the classified intelligence assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
"The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump, and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran's nuclear program," she said in a post on X.
Rafael Grossi, Director General of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, told Fox News on Tuesday that the agency has not yet been able to fully assess the impact of the strikes due to lack of access.
He said Natanz was the first to be hit and sustained “very serious damage” in one of the centrifuge halls where enrichment was being carried out. He added that Isfahan also sustained damage but stressed that “nobody has been inside the halls to assess the damage.”
The judiciary’s official news outlet, Mizan, reported on Wednesday that Edris Aali, Azad Shojaei, and Rasoul Ahmad Mohammad were put to death at Urmia Central Prison in northwest Iran.
The three were charged with "corruption on earth" and "enmity against God," accusations often levied in cases involving alleged collaboration with foreign governments.
Authorities said the men had worked to smuggle components hidden in shipments of alcoholic beverages, which they claim were ultimately used in the assassination of a high-ranking Iranian official.
While Iranian state media did not name Fakhrizadeh directly in its recent coverage, the allegations correspond with earlier reports linking the men to his killing.
Fakhrizadeh, a senior officer in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and a prominent figure in its nuclear development efforts, was shot dead in an attack east of Tehran in November 2020. Iran has blamed Israel for orchestrating the assassination.
Contested confessions and accusations of torture
Human rights organizations have raised concerns about the case. According to an exclusive report by Iran International, all three men—reportedly Kurdish cross-border porters known as kolbars—were convicted based on confessions obtained under severe duress.
Aali and Shojaei were reportedly detained for months in Ministry of Intelligence facilities before being transferred to Urmia Prison.
Family members told media outlets the men denied involvement and said their televised confessions were extracted under torture. Ahmad Mohammad, an Iraqi national from the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah, was arrested two years after the killing, allegedly after his phone number was found in Aali’s contact list.
Israel has not officially claimed responsibility for the assassination, though officials have not denied involvement. In the years following the incident, Israeli media and intelligence sources have described it as a remote-controlled, AI-assisted operation using a weapon smuggled into Iran in parts and reassembled inside the country.
An Israeli intelligence officer told Channel 12 in 2022 that the operation relied on facial recognition to avoid harming Fakhrizadeh’s wife, who was in the car with him, and took less than three minutes to carry out.
Iran’s former Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi said in 2022 that efforts to apprehend the main perpetrators had failed, with several suspects fleeing the country shortly after the attack.
Fakhrizadeh, long described by Western intelligence agencies as the architect of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, was sanctioned by the United Nations and had survived previous assassination attempts.
According to the report, the arrests targeted what authorities described as an “active espionage and sabotage network” that intensified operations after Israel’s attack on June 12, which killed several senior Iranian military and nuclear figures.
Those killed included IRGC commanders Hossein Salami and Mohammad Bagheri, nuclear scientist Ali Akbar Tehranchi, and former nuclear chief Fereydoon Abbasi, the report said.
Those detained are accused of conducting intelligence operations for Israel, including controlling micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) and suicide drones, building improvised explosives, photographing sensitive military installations, and transmitting data to Israeli forces. Fars said more than 10,000 MAVs were seized in Tehran alone.
The arrests were based on public tips and security operations and were concentrated in the provinces of Kermanshah (126), Isfahan (76), Khuzestan (62), Fars (53), Lorestan (49), and the capital Tehran, where exact figures have not been released. The official numbers exclude detained foreign nationals.
The US-based human rights website HRANA reported on Wednesday that 823 Iranian citizens were on political or security-related charges since the outbreak of the war.
According to the report, 286 people were detained for their online activities, including sharing content about Israel’s attack on Iran.
The total number of arrests made by Iranian security and law enforcement forces on national security grounds has reached 537, HRANA said.
Iran’s judiciary announced that three men convicted of espionage for Israel — Majid Mosayebi, Esmail Fekri, and Mohammad Amin Mahdavi-Shayesteh — were executed over the past two weeks.
Emergency bill for war espionage
Iran’s parliament passed an emergency bill this week to increase penalties for espionage and collaboration with “hostile states,” allowing suspects to be tried under wartime conditions.
Judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei said those arrested in the context of Israel’s recent attacks would be prosecuted under “wartime legal provisions.”
Judiciary spokesperson Asghar Jahangir said on state TV that current espionage laws are “too general” and inadequate for addressing recent cases, adding that legal reforms are needed to handle detainees linked to the conflict with Israel.
The bill, passed with 221 votes in favor, none against, and one abstention out of 223 members present, would bar the UN nuclear watchdog’s inspectors from accessing Iran’s nuclear facilities. The legislation must now be ratified by the Supreme National Security Council.
IAEA access blocked unless 'security guaranteed'
Parliamentary presidium member Alireza Salimi said the bill prohibits IAEA inspectors from entering Iran unless the safety of Iran’s nuclear facilities and peaceful activities is “guaranteed”—a determination that would fall to the Supreme National Security Council.
The legislation’s conditions for resuming cooperation with the IAEA include, full assurance of Iran’s national sovereignty and territorial integrity, guarantees of Iran’s right to uranium enrichment under Article 4 of the nuclear Non-ProliferationTreaty (NPT), confirmation that the UN Security Council will not trigger the “snapback” mechanism under Resolution 2231.
The bill further criminalizes any act of allowing IAEA inspectors into the country without such guarantees and applies to both safeguards and additional protocol cooperation.
Parliament also voted to impose penalties on officials permitting unauthorized access.
“This legislation is a response to attacks on our sovereignty and peaceful nuclear infrastructure by the Zionist regime and the United States,” Salimi said.
Tehran says it does not seek nuclear weapons and suggests a resolution adopted this month by the IAEA declaring Iran in breach of its non-proliferation obligations paved the way for Israel's attacks.
The move comes amid a halt in fighting between Iran and Israel, after 12 days of missile and drone attacks that saw unprecedented strikes on Israeli cities and Iranian nuclear and military infrastructure.
No peace, only pause
While the guns have fallen silent for now, Iranian lawmakers stressed that the current calm does not constitute a ceasefire agreement, calling it "only a pause in attacks.”
During a meeting of parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, spokesperson Ebrahim Rezai said, “We have not entered a truce. There is no peace. If the Zionist regime commits another act of aggression, we will respond with greater force.”
According to Rezaei, Iran received the request to halt fire indirectly from the United States through a third-party regional intermediary.
Rezai also said that Iran has the legal right under Article 10 of the NPT and Article 60 of the 1969 Vienna Convention to suspend cooperation with the IAEA due to “attacks on the peaceful nuclear infrastructure” by Israel and the US.
Lawmakers accuse IAEA of espionage and bias
Parliament members criticized the IAEA and its Director General Rafael Grossi, accusing the agency of providing “false reports,” politically biased behavior, and facilitating espionage against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
Rezai said there are plans to file formal complaints against IAEA officials for alleged misconduct and spying.
Lawmakers also called for international legal action against Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, urging war crimes proceedings and demands for reparations.
Ali Khezrian, a key proponent of the bill, accused the US, European powers, and the IAEA of exploiting Iran’s transparency to enable military targeting of its facilities.
“They have weaponized technical reports and paved the way for Israel's acts of sabotage,” he said.
Khezrian argued that Iran’s nuclear cooperation had consistently exceeded legal obligations, and accused Western powers of demanding Iran cease uranium enrichment entirely — a right enshrined under Article 4 of the NPT. “They attack our nuclear sites and then ask to inspect the damage. How can we trust such a system?” he said.
Iran has had a fractious relationship with the UN watchdog, barring a third of its inspectors two years ago, calling the organization politically motivated. In another move in 2022, Iran removed several of the agency's monitoring cameras.
Iran to accelerate nuclear program
Speaker of Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, in a fiery speech before the vote, praised the armed forces and warned the West not to underestimate Iran’s capabilities.
“We remain fully armed and ready to retaliate. Our peaceful nuclear program will now advance even faster,” he said.
Ghalibaf added that Iran’s missile responses had forced both the US and Israel to backtrack on their strategic goals while Israel says the country has achieved its objectives.
The speaker's remarks were met with chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” from lawmakers in the chamber.
Also on Wednesday, IAEA chief Grossi said the inspectors' return to Iranian nuclear facilities is the organization's number one priority.