The UN nuclear watchdog said Monday that it has found traces of uranium in Syria in its investigation into a building Israel destroyed in 2007.
The Deir Ezzor site, which included the building, was the target of an Israeli strike in September 2007 on Syria’s nuclear reactor. Israel did not officially take responsibility for the bombing for more than a decade, in part to avoid retaliation from Damascus. But Jerusalem was widely presumed to be behind the strike, and officially acknowledged it in 2018.
The government of now-deposed Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad had claimed the site was a conventional military base. But in a report to member states on Monday, the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency said it has long believed Deir Ezzor was probably an undeclared nuclear reactor.
In a prior report released in 2011, the IAEA had concluded that the building was “very likely” to have been a reactor built in secret, and that Damascus should have declared it.
Since then, the agency has been trying to come to a definitive conclusion, and under a renewed push last year, it was able to take environmental samples at three unnamed locations “that were allegedly functionally related” to Deir Ezzor, it said in the confidential report, seen by Reuters.
The agency found “a significant number of natural uranium particles in samples taken at one of the three locations. The analysis of these particles indicated that the uranium is of anthropogenic origin, i.e. that it was produced as a result of chemical processing,” the report said.
The term “natural” indicates the uranium was not enriched. The report did not come to a conclusion as to what the discovered traces mean.
“The current Syrian authorities indicated that they had no information that might explain the presence of such uranium particles,” the report said, referring to the Islamist-led government that deposed Assad at the end of 2024. The current Syrian government granted the IAEA access to the site again in June this year to take more environmental samples.
At a meeting the same month between IAEA chief Rafael Grossi and Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, “Syria agreed to cooperate with the Agency, through full transparency, to address Syria’s past nuclear activities,” the report said.
At that meeting, Grossi asked for Syria’s help in returning to Deir Ezzor itself “in the next few months in order to conduct further analysis, access relevant documentation and to talk to those involved in Syria’s past nuclear activities.”
The report said the IAEA was still planning to visit Deir Ezzor and would evaluate the results of the environmental samples taken at the other site.
“Once this process has been completed and the results evaluated, there will be an opportunity to clarify and resolve the outstanding safeguards issues related to Syria’s past nuclear activities and to bring the matter to a close,” it said.
The 2007 strike was widely regarded as a success. It came decades after a 1981 Israeli strike on Iraq’s nuclear reactor and was followed earlier this year by Israel’s attack on Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites and ballistic missile program. That June strike sparked a 12-day air war and involved a US military intervention.
The IDF has been deployed at nine posts inside southern Syria since the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, mostly within a UN-patrolled buffer zone on the border between the countries.
Israeli forces have been operating in areas up to 15 kilometers (some nine miles) deep into Syria, including Beit Jinn, aiming to capture weapons that Israel says could pose a threat to the country if they fall into the hands of hostile forces.