Anthony Reuben
BBC Verify senior journalist

We’ll be closing this live page shortly, but our late team will continue to look for more footage to verify and feed into reporting across BBC News.

Today, we’ve been analysing satellite images of two Russian air bases that Ukraine says its forces attacked in recent days.

We’ve looked into the two-child limit on benefit payments after former Prime Minister Gordon Brown said raising taxes on gambling firms could pay for the policy to be abolished.

And we’ve been verifying footage of damage from Israel’s overnight attacks on targets in southern Lebanon.

BBC Verify Live will be back tomorrow. In the meantime we have a wealth of videos, investigations and analysis as well as our most recent live pages on the BBC Verify section of the BBC News website.

Sherie Ryder
BBC Verify journalist

We’re continuing to monitor what people are posting about the wildfires in south-western France that have burned through an area larger than Paris.

More than 2,000 firefighters and 500 firefighting vehicles continue to be deployed to the Aude region, alongside gendarmerie and army personnel, officials said on Thursday.

We found a clip, external where a person films smoke drifting across the countryside. The key task here - as well as checking that the footage is not of an old fire that has been re-posted - is to ensure that the location fits with the current news story.

We look at various physical features like roads, landmarks and the surrounding terrain and then check the footage against online map tools from Google and Bing.

As you can see in the graphic below - I checked the curve in the road, the river, the wall, and the roofs of the houses seen in the footage (bottom row) with online mapping (top image).

Those checks led me to geolocate the position the person was filming from to the outskirts of the town of Ribaute – near Avenue des Corbieres.

Paul Brown
BBC Verify senior journalist

Israel's overnight strikes on Lebanon were the latest in a string of cross-border incidents on both sides since a ceasefire was declared on 27 November 2024 following last year’s conflict with Hezbollah.

Some significant attacks took place while the ceasefire was in effect, including:

• 2 December 2024: The Lebanese health ministry said 10 people were killed in the most significant wave of Israeli air strikes since the ceasefire came into effect. Shortly before, Hezbollah said it had attacked an IDF post in a disputed area as a warning over "repeated violations" of the deal
• 26 January 2025: On the day the ceasefire deal was initially due to expire, Lebanon's health ministry accused Israeli forces of killing 22 people and wounding 124 as displaced communities attempted to return to occupied areas. On that same day, a one-month extension to the deal was announced

The first post-ceasefire strike on Beirut's southern suburbs occurred on 28 March when Israel said it hit a drone storage facility in the Hadath neighbourhood. Israel said this was in response to a rocket attack from southern Lebanon which Hezbollah denied knowledge of. The Israeli strike was preceded by an evacuation warning.

Two days later, and without warning, Israel struck the Lebanese capital again killing a Hezbollah official and three other people.

Footage we verified at the time showed considerable damage to the top three floors of a high-rise in the Haret Hreik area of the city.

We also recorded strikes on 15 July when 12 people were reported killed in the Bekaa Valley in northern Lebanon.

Israel said it had struck Hezbollah targets in what it called a "warning" to the group against re-establishing itself. The local governor said seven of those killed were Syrian nationals.

Sebastian Vandermeersch and Peter Mwai
BBC Verify

We’re looking into reports on Sudan’s state TV that the country’s armed forces have destroyed a United Arab Emirates aircraft carrying mercenaries from Colombia as it landed at Nyala airport in the country’s western South Darfur region.

We are searching for visual evidence of the incident and have so far not discovered any footage or images.

This involves searching for and analysing images and video posted online and looking at the latest satellite imagery of the location.BBC news teams in Africa are also attempting to get information from various authorities.

Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, has been a key stronghold of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) who have been fighting the Sudanese army in a civil war for more than two years. The RSF has been accused of using the airport to transport mercenaries into the country - although it denies using hired foreign fighters.

We have been investigating the apparent involvement of mercenaries in the conflict in Sudan since last November when identity documents belonging to a Colombian national were posted online by fighters operating alongside the Sudanese army in Darfur.

We have verified a video, said to be filmed by a mercenary thought to be from Colombia, showing him driving through the Zamzam displacement camp in North Darfur towards el-Fasher which has been under siege from the RSF for more than a year.

We geolocated the video by matching distinctive buildings and roads visible in the footage to satellite imagery and confirmed it had been posted online in recent days. The same man, identifiable by his uniform and facial features, appears in other social media posts posing with weapons, other fighters, and possible child soldiers.

Ben Chu
BBC Verify policy and analysis correspondent

Image source, Getty Images

Gordon Brown has called on Rachel Reeves to hike gambling taxes in the autumn Budget, with the former prime minister telling the BBC the gambling industry is “undertaxed”.

Brown has given his backing to a new report from the Institute for Public Policy Research, external (IPPR) think tank which calls for various UK gambling taxes to be increased to raise around £3.2bn extra per year to pay for the removal of the two-child benefit limit and to scrap the household benefit cap.

Gambling is currently exempt from Value Added Tax, external so, in that sense, it’s correct to say that gambling is more lightly taxed than alcohol and tobacco which do attract VAT. However, the sector is subject to other specific levies such as general betting duty and remote gaming duty.

Existing gambling taxes raised £3.6bn in total in 2024-25, external.

Tax experts consulted by Verify said it was uncertain whether it would be practically possible to raise an additional £3.2bn a year on top of what is already collected through existing levies, although some said such a sum was plausible.

Much would depend on how the cost of the additional taxes is absorbed - for instance whether it cut into the profits of gambling firms or they passed it on to their customers in some way.

If people responded to a rise in costs by gambling less, the tax rise would not raise as much money as if their behaviour did not change.

Paul Brown
BBC Verify senior journalist

A recent break in heavy cloud cover has revealed evidence of two claimed Ukrainian attacks on Russian air bases in recent days, thanks to satellite imagery.

On 2 August, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said it had targeted a storage and launch site for Shahed drones at Primorsko-Akhtarsk in the southern region of Krasnodar.

An image from Planet Labs, taken yesterday, shows a series of sizable burn marks in grassy areas around the taxiway. There is no obvious damage to any buildings, or the main runway, but the images are quite low resolution which makes it tricky to make a firm assessment.

Similar burn marks are evident in four locations in occupied Crimea, where the SBU said it had struck five Russian fighter jets at the Saki airfield, leaving one "completely destroyed" on 4 August.

There is no evidence of that in these images - possibly because of the resolution, or because sufficient time has passed for any damaged aircraft to be removed.

We'll await better quality images to make an assessment.

Anthony Reuben
BBC Verify senior journalist

We’re doing some work today around the two-child limit - the UK government policy of limiting certain benefits to the first two children in a family (with some exceptions).

Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been talking about the need to scrap the limit to reduce child poverty.

The limit was announced by the then Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, external in 2015 and came into force for children born after 6 April 2017.

The Conservative government that was in power at the time brought it in so that people claiming benefits would face the same financial choices about having children as people who do not.

But as one report from a committee of MPs said, external: “This assumes, however, that all pregnancies are planned - and in full knowledge of the government’s social security policy.”

When the policy was introduced it was supposed to eventually save £3bn a year. Current estimates are, external that abolishing it would cost about £2.5bn a year - although that rises as more families are affected.

Analysis funded by the Nuffield Foundation, external suggested that the policies “have contributed to the rising levels of child poverty in the 2010s” and “predominately affected larger families”.

The same report also said the two-child limit "had only a very small effect on fertility, meaning its main effect is to push families with three or more children further into poverty".

Image source, Getty Images

Peter Mwai and Richard Irvine-Brown
BBC Verify

Image source, Google

Pictures have emerged this morning following Israeli air strikes in southern Lebanon.

Having verified night-time video of an explosion - referred to in our earlier post - we know one of the places hit was to the west of the Lebanese village of Deir Seryan.

Based on the time that elapses between seeing and hearing the explosion we know the video was filmed from a few hundred metres away. The timecodes on multiple X posts of the video, plus the HTML data on the earliest Instagram copy we’ve seen, all point to it being first shared around 22:30-22:45 local time (20:30-20:45 BST).

Pictures in daylight, broadcast on Lebanese media, show one building has been destroyed and another damaged in an area the correct distance to the east.

They also show the remains of several yellow construction vehicles. This tallies with satellite imagery from May which shows heavy machinery at work around these buildings.

Additional verification by Paul Brown

Benedict Garman
BBC Verify senior journalist

The UN’s satellite centre (Unosat) has published its most recent assessment, external of damage in Gaza, finding around 78% of buildings there were damaged or destroyed by Israel by July this year.

Based on satellite images taken on 8 July it says 192,812 of all structures have been damaged with 102,067 - more than 40% - completely destroyed. Of the damaged structures, it says nearly 300,000 are housing units, like apartments, for example.

Over the last three months, the biggest increase in damage has been in the southern Gaza areas of Khan Younis and Rafah. This is where we recently documented entire towns being systematically demolished by the Israeli military, like Abasan al-Kabira, seen in the images below.

Unosat makes these estimates by comparing recent satellite imagery to pre-war images captured in 2023.

Anthony Reuben
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, Getty Images

Former UK Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown has repeated his call for higher taxes on gambling to pay for the scrapping of the two-child limit for some benefits.

His comments come after a report from the Institute for Public Policy Research, external , external(IPPR), external think tank predicted such a move could raise £3bn.

The two-child limit restricts benefits such as universal credit to the first two children in a family (with some exceptions). The limit came into force for children born after 6 April 2017 and the Conservative policy has been kept by the Labour government so far.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that scrapping the limit would eventually cost the government £2.5bn a year and describes it as a, external “quick and cost-effective fix for bringing large numbers of children above the poverty line”.

The IPPR also proposes ending the benefit cap, external, which restricts the total amount a household can receive in benefits. It says the £3bn raised from higher gambling levies would pay to end that and the two-child limit.

The government’s child poverty strategy, which was due to be published in the spring, is now expected to be out in time for the Budget in the autumn.

Peter Mwai and Richard Irvine-Brown
BBC Verify

We’ve had confirmation from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) which says it has “struck Hezbollah infrastructure sites” in southern Lebanon.

We’ve seen multiple reports in recent hours from Lebanese and Israeli media of air strikes in southern Lebanon. Locations suggested include Ansar, Nabatieh and Mahmoudiya.

We’re reviewing clips posted on social media overnight but, given they are mostly in the dark and in more remote areas, it takes longer to find where they are filmed.

So far, we have identified the location of this video which emerged overnight as the forecourt of a petrol station to the west of a small village called Deir Seryan.

Image source, Instagram

Daylight images are emerging now, which will give us a better handle on what has been hit and where, and perhaps what has caused the damage.

We’re also looking at satellite images which detect heat signatures, such as the burning after airstrikes, to give us another perspective.

We’ll keep you updated.

Rob Corp
BBC Verify Live editor

Good morning.

Since late last night our verification team has been looking into reports that the Israeli military has carried out a series of air strikes in southern Lebanon. At the moment footage we’ve seen was taken last night and we’re in the process of checking it’s genuine. More on that to come shortly.

Elsewhere we’re investigating former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s call to use higher gambling taxes to fund the cost of scrapping the two-child benefit cap. We’ll look into his comments, and assess how likely it is that increasing levies could raise the necessary funds.

As well as those stories to come here on BBC Verify Live we’ve got a new report from the United Nations on the number of buildings that have been destroyed across the Gaza Strip since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas.

Plus we’ll keep across the wildfires in southern France by checking on Nasa’s heat source satellites.