Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett on Tuesday accused Iran of stealing classified UN nuclear watchdog reports under a plan to prepare ways of staving off scrutiny of its nuclear programme.
Reuters reported that neither Tehran nor the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) immediately responded to requests for comment about the allegations.
"Iran stole classified (IAEA) documents ... and used that information to systematically evade nuclear probes," Bennett said in a social media post that included a selection of the alleged stolen files, some of them translated into English.
"How do we know? Because we got our hands on Iran’s deception plan."
A Bennett aide said the latter assertion referred to Israeli spies' publication in 2018 of what they said was a secret trove of documents seized in Iran and related to its nuclear projects. Tehran called that so-called "Atomic Archive" a fabrication.
Bennett quoted an Iranian defence official as writing in the alleged documents that "sooner or later they (IAEA) will ask us, and we'll need to have a comprehensive cover story for them".
The IAEA spent more than a decade investigating Iran's past activities, and is now again seeking answers from Iran on the origin of uranium particles found at three undeclared sites.
