Lucy Gilder
BBC Verify journalist

Thanks for following BBC Verify Live today.

We’ve been looking into small boat crossings of the English Channel today - as the issue is expected to come up when French President Emmanuel Macron takes part in a UK-France summit later this week.

Macron is on a three-day state visit and you can follow today's events live here.

We’ve also been across footage of floods in Nepal and analysed satellite imagery of demolitions by Israeli forces in Gaza.

There’s more to come from us this evening as our late reporter is looking to verify material showing Israeli drones targeting Lebanon while also keeping an eye on the wildfires reported near Marseilles in southern France.

And do check the BBC’s social channels later for our explainer video on President Donald Trump’s cuts and the Texas floods.

Tamara Kovacevic
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, Getty Images

Writing in the Telegraph ahead of President Macron’s visit to the UK, external, shadow home secretary Chris Philp accused French authorities of not doing enough to stop migrants leaving French beaches in small boats.

He contrasted that to Belgium and said: “The Belgians do properly intercept on the beaches and at sea, and as a result, embarkations from Belgian shores dropped by over 90%.”

However, the Belgian federal police told us that cases of small boats leaving the Belgian coast are very rare due to the distance between Belgium and the UK. They registered two attempts in the whole of 2024 and none so far this year.

We contacted the Conservative party press office and they said that Philp’s claim is “over the past five years”, and sent us a 2023 article from the Sun as evidence, external.

The article says: “Across Belgium, just 944 people were detected making their way to Britain last year [2022]— compared to 12,848 in 2018.”

Belgian police told us these figures were published by the Belgian minister for justice in 2023 but they were for the total amount of illegal migrants reported to authorities, regardless of the method they used. “It is not correct to link these numbers to small boat cases,” they said.

Paul Brown
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, X

We've been looking into reports of wildfires around the French city of Marseille, which have forced the suspension of flights from the city's airport.

Heat signatures detected from space by Nasa satellites and shared on the Firms website show what appears to be several fires around the area of Les Pennes-Mirabeau. The Nasa data was recorded at around 11:00 local time (10:00 BST).

Footage filmed from a moving vehicle and posted to X earlier today by a local taxi firm shows smoke and poor visibility on the road. We confirmed that the footage was filmed in a vehicle heading south on the A55 road heading out of Marseille.

The aircraft-tracking website FlightRadar24 shows departures or arrivals from Marseille-Provence Airport have been cancelled or diverted since midday local time.

Image source, NASA

Benedict Garman
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, Planet Labs

Earlier we reported on what Israeli defence minister Israel Katz has called a new "humanitarian area" for Gaza which is intended to be developed in the south of the strip.

According to Katz, the first to be moved under this plan would be around 600,000 internally displaced people from the coastal area of al-Mawasi - a small section of land between Rafah and Khan Younis.

The people living here have already been forced to abandon their homes to find safety, sometimes several times over, and are in al-Mawasi at the direction of the Israeli military which designated this part of the strip a “humanitarian zone”.

However, it wasn't recognised by international humanitarian organisations, and the Israel Defense Forces changed the boundaries of the area nearly 20 times.

Satellite images like the one above, captured on 4 July by Planet Labs, give us a sense of the scale of the population who are now living there in temporary shelters and the density of their living conditions.

According to Ralph Wilde, professor of international law at University College London, the Katz plan would be “illegal on multiple levels, as a war crime (serious violation of the laws of war), a crime against humanity, and genocide”.

Anthony Reuben
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, PA Media

The Children’s Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, published a report this morning, external in which she condemns the “almost-Dickensian level of poverty facing some children in England today”.

She says the government’s decision to give free school meals to more children will help alleviate child poverty, but says: “I’m also very clear that any child poverty strategy must be built on the foundation of scrapping the two-child limit.”

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 think tank estimates that scrapping it 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 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.

Shruti Menon
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, RSS

We’ve been looking at footage showing extensive flooding in Nepal during the last 24 hours which have left seven people dead and more than a dozen are missing.

One clip we’ve verified shows a Nepali army helicopter rescuing people from a tree as muddy brown floodwater from the Trishuli river rushes past them.

We used Google Earth imagery to match the location of the footage and found the video was filmed in Bidur, north-west of the capital Kathmandu.

Nepal’s disaster management authority has also shared dramatic footage of the helicopter rescue.

We’ve verified another video showing damage at a customs checkpoint in the Rasuwa municipality of Nepal near the border with China where several vehicles were parked.

Both the videos we’ve verified have been checked with BBC Nepali which is covering the story.

Tom Edgington
BBC Verify

French President Emmanuel Macron is visiting the UK as Sir Keir Starmer presses for more help to stem migrant Channel crossings.

So far this year, 21,117 people have arrived in the UK in small boats - up almost 56% compared with the same period last year.

To reduce numbers, it has been reported that the UK is seeking a “one in, out out” asylum deal with France.

This would allow the UK to send illegal migrants who have crossed the Channel back to France. In return, the UK would accept asylum seekers from France with a UK connection - such as family ties.

Madeleine Sumption from the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford told BBC Verify that the EU and Turkey introduced a similar scheme in 2016.

However, it was used alongside other measures - including physically intercepting boats - making it hard to judge the effectiveness of the “one in, one out” scheme alone, she adds.

For any scheme to be successful, she says there has to be a strong disincentive:

“The core idea is to try and create a disincentive for people to cross. If a high share of people are sent [to France], many people will know about it and it will have an impact as it changes people’s assessment.

“On the other hand, if you send a small percentage people will just see it as another risk.”

You can read more about government pledges on illegal migration here.

Lucy Gilder
BBC Verify journalist

Image source, PA

As French President Emmanuel Macron starts his three-day state visit to the UK today, we’re looking ahead to a UK-France summit on Thursday which is expected to discuss tackling small boat crossings of the English Channel.

The UK government is under pressure to cut the number of migrants arriving this way and has pledged to work with the French authorities to do this.

Previous deals have included sending money to France to pay for policing on their coast. It’s not always clear how much money has been committed, versus how much has actually been spent.

Shadow home secretary Chris Philp said the UK “should be asking France for a refund” because of the continued rise in small boat crossings. “We’ve paid France £771m and they’ve stopped very few migrants on land and none at sea,” he told the Daily Mail, external.

Looking at the latest major agreement, external signed between the two countries in March 2023, the UK agreed to provide €541m (about £476m at the time) over the following three years.

In January last year, the government said it had, external , external“provided, external almost €500, externalm, external” , external(£432m) to France since 2018. But again, we don’t know whether or how all this money has been spent.

Home Office data, external provided by French authorities shows that this year so far, an estimated 12,321 migrant preventions have been recorded - a broad category that counts:

• Individuals prevented from leaving France or those who return to France
• Finds of small boats equipment
• Arrests of people linked to small boats crossings

Previous Home Office statements, external have said that about 33,000 crossings were prevented in 2022 and about 26,000 in 2023.

However, we don’t know how many migrants who were prevented from crossing, tried again and were successful.

Peter Mwai
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, X

Police in Kenya say at least 11 people were killed, external in nationwide anti-government protests on Monday which coincided with the 35th anniversary of pro-democracy demonstrations against the late former President Daniel arap Moi.

We have been monitoring images and video on social media to understand the extent of the protests and what happened.We have verified recent footage of an incident in a town called Ngong, less than 30km (19 miles) west of the capital Nairobi, where there were fierce clashes between protesters and police.

Loud gunshots can be heard in one video and at some point we can see a muzzle flash. Still images published later show at least four individuals lying motionless.

We have established where the video and images were captured by comparing buildings and other structures with what can be seen on Google Street View imagery.

To the east of Nairobi, in the town of Juja, we have verified a video showing people in police uniform dragging someone who appears lifeless into the police station. We have identified the building by matching the gate, electricity poles and a drainage cover seen in the footage to Google Street View imagery.

Kumar Malhotra
BBC Verify senior journalist

We’ve been monitoring video and images that emerged in recent days showing a number of wildfires burning in the Latakia area of north-western Syria.

We’re tracking the spread and extent of the fires by using satellite-based data provided by the US space agency Nasa that shows heat signatures for specific locations and dates.

On 3 July some fires were clearly detected in north-western Syria and by 5 July there were significantly more heat signatures in the Nasa data. While fewer heat signatures showed up in the last two days we should say that not every fire is detected by satellite due to cloud cover - or that the fire is too small or too cool to be picked up.

Posts by the local authorities show them still battling blazes in a number of areas, with the help of teams from neighbouring Turkey and Jordan.

Syria’s Minister of Emergency and Disaster Management, Raed al-Saleh, said on Sunday that 10,000 hectares of forest had been destroyed in Latakia.

Image source, NASA

Image source, NASA

Lucy Gilder
BBC Verify journalist

Image source, EPA

Following the deadly Texas floods, there have been claims that cuts to the US federal government - under President Trump - may have adversely affected the ability of the National Weather Service (NWS) to predict floods and storms.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has said that NWS offices in Texas "were well staffed… so any claims to the contrary are completely false”.

To get to the bottom of these claims and counterclaims, we examined the impact of workforce cuts to the weather service under the current Trump administration.

After the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) made cuts to federal agencies earlier this year, the NWS lost 600 of its 4,200 staff in the US, according to the director of the agency’s union Tom Fahy.

However, climate experts told us that NWS staffing in Texas - ahead of the floods - appears to have been adequate and the forecasts and warnings were what would have been expected.

We also looked at the impact of cuts to NWS offices in Texas, as well as claims about reduced weather balloon launches, which you can read about in full here.

Benedict Garman
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, Planet Labs

Israel's defence minister Israel Katz has described a plan he says is under way to establish a new 'humanitarian city' on the ruins of Rafah in the south of Gaza.

The plan initially aims to accommodate 600,000 displaced Palestinians who are currently living in the al-Mawasi area on the Gazan coast. This is where Israeli forces have told people to go for “safety” throughout the war - though it has also been targeted by strikes more than 100 times.

At least four more aid distribution sites - like the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation facilities already in operation - would be built under the Katz plan. We have already identified one new aid site under construction and can see that it has developed further in recent satellite imagery.

Katz said development of this zone would happen during any potential ceasefire, assuming the current indirect ceasefire negotiations are successful. The ultimate aim would be to eventually move the entire Gazan population into the “city”.

Satellite imagery, like the image above, captured on 4 July by Planet Labs, shows Rafah has been almost entirely reduced to rubble. Yesterday we reported on demolitions taking place in one of the last areas still standing.

Demolitions continue elsewhere in Rafah too, with drone footage, external published on Sunday - we’ve screen-grabbed a key frame below - showing a building named as al-Shawka Girls' Secondary School in online maps being blown up in a controlled explosion.

Image source, X

Rob Corp
BBC Verify Live editor

Good morning from the team at London Broadcasting House.

Today we're working on verifying and fact-checking a range of stories, including:

• Video footage and satellite imagery that shows neighbourhoods across Gaza have been flattened by Israeli forces in the weeks before indirect ceasefire talks resumed
• We've assessed before and after pictures to see how extensive the damage is
• New satellite analysis shows how much damage was done across Israel by Iranian missile attacks during the 12 days of conflict last month
• With French President Emmanuel Macron starting his state visit to the UK we'll be watching for any new deals on small boat crossings

We've also started verifying videos showing extensive flooding on the border between Nepal and China and are monitoring developments in Kenya after yesterday's deadly anti-government protests.