Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s revelation Monday evening that Israel’s Mossad spy agency had seized Iran’s nuclear archive means that the ayatollahs have violated the nuclear deal negotiated by then-President Barack Obama, his EU partners, the Russians, and the Chinese in 2015.

Despite misleading claims by former Obama administration officials and their supporters in the liberal media that the material provided “nothing new,” the existence of the archive itself is a bombshell.

The intelligence Israel captured from a secret warehouse in Teheran includes more than half a ton of documents and computer files that detail the regime’s past work in developing all aspects of a nuclear arsenal. The archive was painstakingly preserved and transferred to a new secret location after Iran concluded the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), otherwise known as the Iran nuclear deal.

According to Ehud Yaari, Arab Affairs commentator for Israel’s Reshet television station, by archiving the material and so preserving Iran’s progress towards constructing nuclear weapons, Iran committed a material breach of the JCPOA.

Paragraph T of Annex 1 of the JCPOA is titled “Activities which could contribute to the design and development of a nuclear explosive device.”

It determines:

Iran will not engage in the following activities which could contribute to the development of a nuclear explosive device: 82.1. Designing, developing, acquiring, or using computer models to simulate nuclear explosive devices. 82.2. Designing, developing, fabricating, acquiring or using multi-part explosive detonation systems suitable for a nuclear device, unless approved by the Joint Commission for non-nuclear purpose and subject to monitoring.”

By maintaining its knowhow in both of these areas, and presumably others which Netanyahu did not detail in his speech, Iran would appear to have broken the agreement. That is, the act of preserving its archive relating to these issues was in and of itself a breach of the deal.

Yaari reported that Iranian officials are deeply concerned that Israel’s revelations will cause the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to determine that Iran is not abiding by the JCPOA — and so pave the way for its disintegration and the renewal of international sanctions against the Iranian regime.

Caroline Glick is a world-renowned journalist and commentator on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy, and the author of The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East. Read more at www.CarolineGlick.com.