We're about to end our live updates from BBC Verify with the news agenda again dominated by the continued Israeli strikes on Iran. For continuing coverage go to the live page here.

Our open-source investigations team will continue to scour social media for further footage emerging from the country in the coming hours, while working to verify new videos that are said to show a strike near the Red Crescent building in the capital Tehran.

We also have an in-depth story to come examining Fordo - the uranium enrichment plant buried deep inside an Iranian mountainside - as experts speculate that it could be targeted by the US if the White House chooses to join Israel's campaign.

And our analysis editor Ros Atkins is examining the Iranian nuclear programme and whether it’s as advanced as Israeli officials claim.

If you want more of BBC Verify’s analysis, investigations and videos go to our pages on the BBC website.

Richard Irvine-Brown
BBC Verify journalist

Image source, Vitali Klitchko

Following yesterday's large-scale Russian drone and missile attack on Kyiv the city’s mayor, Vitali Klitchko, accused Moscow's forces of dropping bomblets filled with ball bearings.

He made the claim in a video which he said was filmed in the Nyvki neighbourhood. Let's run through how we can be certain where he was - an early element in verifying any images.

• You can't tell from the screengrab, but traffic is passing freely in the background. So he's near a wide road

• There's a multi-storey building with a red, pitched roof in the background

• He's in an open space, next to what could be a swing and two benches

• So, we can tell Klitchko is near a reasonably wide street, but not one of the main routes through Nyvki

With these details, we could pinpoint his location to these coordinates: 50.466053, 30.415154.

You can do this sort of verification work yourself at home. If you put these coordinates into any open source map service like Google Maps, Bing or Yandex - a Russian search engine which has good historic images of Ukraine - you should be able to recognise the location from the screengrab above.

Matt Murphy
BBC Verify senior journalist

Analysts have told BBC Verify that Iran is now experiencing a near-total internet blackout, as Israeli strikes continue for a sixth successive day.

You may recall that authorities imposed some restrictions on network access last week, which mainly targeted virtual server providers used by Iranians to access international sites.

But new analysis of live network data by the internet monitoring organisation Netblocks shows that accessibility has collapsed across Iran, with the group noting the pattern is "consistent with an intentional shutting down of the internet" by authorities.

"Today’s blackout is the first near-total loss of connectivity we’ve tracked in Iran since November 2019, and it exceeds the restrictions we tracked during the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests," Isik Mater, the group's director of research, told BBC Verify.

The BBC cannot operate freely in Iran, so restrictions on internet access and citizens' ability to post online can limit material we can gather and verify to understand what’s happening in the country.

"Historically, Iran has tended to shut down internet access over domestic issues, whereas they’ve tried to keep a voice and international presence during international conflicts, so this is something new," Mater noted.

Image source, Netblocks

Ben Chu
BBC Verify policy and analysis correspondent

Earlier today, Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander told the House of Commons that the opening of the HS2 high-speed rail line will be delayed again and the cost will rise further.

Alexander did not specify a new delivery date or a new figure for the cost, saying she would update the House of Commons before the end of the year.

So how much have the estimated costs of this giant project increased so far?

There are lots of numbers being quoted, but these figures are often unadjusted for inflation.

It’s also important to compare like-with-like, given some of the figures refer to the cost of the full project going from London to Manchester, rather than simply the London to Birmingham section, which is now the only section being constructed.

The House of Commons library has collected historic official estimates, external of the London to Birmingham leg (known as Phase 1) and put them into consistent 2019 prices.

This shows the estimated total cost in 2012 rising from £20.5bn to around £53bn in January 2024.

BBC Verify has converted those figures into 2025-26 prices using the Office for Budget Responsibility’, externals , externalmeasure of inflation, external.

This shows the estimated cost, in today’s money, rising from around £26bn in 2012 to around £67bn in January 2024.

Lucy Gilder
BBC Verify journalist

Image source, PA Media

Today during Prime Minister’s Questions it was Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner up against the Conservatives’ Chris Philp instead of the usual party leaders.

Illegal immigration featured prominently, with the pair debating the use of hotels for asylum seekers and the continued rise of small boat crossings.

Here are three claims we fact-checked:

1. Are most small boat migrants men? Philp alluded to a recent row between Treasury Minister Darren Jones and Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf about the gender of small boat arrivals. Philp was right in saying that most are young men - in the first quarter of this year 75% of arrivals were men under 40. Jones had said on the BBC’s Question Time that on the boats he’d seen the majority were children, babies and women and was challenged by Yusuf. Jones later clarified that he’d been talking about one boat he’d seen.
2. Has the government reduced asylum hotels? Rayner said the number of hotels being used for asylum seekers had almost halved since Labour came to power. It’s hard to test her claim because the Home Office doesn’t regularly publish this data. BBC Verify recently obtained data showing that several more asylum hotels were being used in the first six months of Labour being in power.
3. Are small boat arrivals worse under Labour than under the Tories? The PMQs stand-ins offered different statistics on small boats. Philp said that 2025 so far had been “the worst year in history for illegal immigrants crossing the Channel”, whereas Rayner said there had been more arrivals over a yearly period during the Conservative government than under Labour. Both statements are true, but are looking at different time periods.

Emma Pengelly
BBC Verify journalist

With the Israel Defense Forces, external , external(IDF), external say, externaling, external it’s conducting air strikes on “military targets” in Tehran this afternoon, our social media feeds have been filling with video of smoke clouds, said to be filmed in Iran’s capital.

The screengrab above is from one video showing the Tehran skyline. I’ve counted at least four smoke clouds - the apparent aftermath of blasts - rising from the east of the city.

It was filmed from the Tavanir area of the capital and there are plenty of landmarks to confirm the camera position, including the damaged One Holding Tower. Two high-rise blocks, a square-shaped building with a pitched roof and lower structures in a nearby park helped confirm the location.

Searching multiple frames of the video in Google only detected versions posted online in roughly the last hour.

We’re now seeing a lot of footage appearing online purporting to show Tehran being bombarded again and are continuing to verify material so it can be used by colleagues in the BBC’s reporting - as we are not allowed to operate freely in Iran.

Joshua Cheetham
BBC Verify journalist

We’ve been speaking to experts about the latest satellite imagery showing the impact of recent Israeli strikes against Iran.

One shows a large plane obliterated at Mashhad airport, about 750km (470 miles) east of Tehran.

Jeremy Binnie, Middle East specialist at Jane’s defence intelligence, says it’s a “fair assumption” the aircraft was the same Boeing KC-707 aerial tanker parked in the same area in earlier imagery.

Binnie says there “wasn’t much requirement” to destroy this plane “given the limited threat” posed by the Iranian air force.

“But it did enable the IDF to claim the longest-range strike to date and made a big fire, sending the message that nowhere in Iran is safe,” he adds.

Stu Ray, senior imagery analyst at McKenzie Intelligence Services, says if it is a KC-707 this could “catastrophically impact” the Iranian air force’s ability to operate but agrees its ability to operate against Israel is limited.

Binnie says Iran "has barely invested in the [air force] for decades with the money going to ballistic missiles, [drones], and ground-based air defence instead."

He adds that Israel’s targeting of “all possible air threats” may suggest it is planning to eventually fly surveillance aircraft and other more vulnerable planes into Iranian airspace.

Another image shows what Maxar have described as Shahed drones stored on trailers and fighter aircraft at Dezful air force base in western Iran. None of these aircraft appear to be damaged.

Ray says the jets are “ageing F-5 Tigers” that will be in a "poor state" and "no match for the aircraft used by the Israelis".

Beth Godwin
BBC Trending reporter

Back in March, cyber security firm founder Dawid Moczadło posted a recording of a job interview he’d conducted.

The candidate’s appearance blurred strangely and he refused to put his hand in front of his face when asked too. Dawid suspected the candidate was disguising his face using artificial intelligence and shut down the call.

He told me he believed the person could be a North Korean IT worker in disguise. For BBC Trending, we’ve spoken to North Korean defectors who have insider knowledge of a secret scheme run by the government in Pyongyang.

It’s estimated that thousands of North Korean IT workers are deployed to China, Russia and countries in South-East Asia and Africa to fraudulently secure remote work by concealing their real identity to raise money for Kim Jong Un’s regime. Last year one firm was hacked after accidentally hiring a North Korean cyber-criminal.

We sent Dawid’s video to digital forensics experts at Get Real Security who confirmed it’s highly likely the candidate was using some kind of face-swapping or AI filter.

Although we don’t know for certain that the person Dawid interviewed was definitely part of this scheme, we do know cyber security and software development professionals are becoming inundated with suspicious candidates. One tech founder I spoke to believes he’s interviewed up to 30 North Koreans in disguise.

You can get more on this story by listening to Could your colleague be a North Korean in disguise? on the BBC World Service website.

Robert Cuffe
BBC Verify head of statistics

News addicts who have their phone notifications switched on may have been woken this morning by pings alerting them to the latest UK inflation figures.

The headline figure is that prices rose by 3.4% between May last year and this year.

However some news organisations, like the BBC, reported the pace of those rises is "holding steady" while others said it had slowed slightly from 3.5% in April.

So why the difference?

There are two versions of April's inflation figure out there, both published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Officially, the ONS recorded the rate of inflation in April was 3.5%, external. But it says that figure was based on incorrect road tax data it received.

The ONS told everyone about the error and said that, without it, the April figure would have been 3.4%.

However it has said that it will not change the official record - so those reporting “a fall” and those saying inflation is “holding steady” have an official source to back them up.

Neither interpretation changes the big picture - prices are rising a little faster than we’d like.

Merlyn Thomas
BBC Verify senior reporter

Israel says one of its main goals is to destroy Iran's nuclear capabilities. The Fordo nuclear site, which is buried inside a mountain, is one of the most heavily fortified.

There's only one conventional weapon that could destroy it - and only the US is known to have it.

I’ve been investigating the weapon that could change the course of the conflict.

Rob England
BBC Verify senior data journalist

The issue of migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats has just come up in Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons.

To get an idea how many people are making the crossing and how the numbers compare with previous years we run a rolling tracker that can be used across BBC News.

But where do we get this data from?

The figures come from Border Force agents who are on the ground counting the number of people and vessels arriving in the UK each day.

The Home Office then uses the figures to produce daily updates, external (usually published the following day in the afternoon).

It also publishes small boat arrivals data going back to 2018, which is when they were first recorded by the government.

It is an offence to enter the UK without permission so small boat crossings are considered to be a form of illegal immigration.

Most of those who cross the Channel in small boats claim asylum - which they are legally entitled to do under international law - and about half of those who applied were granted refugee status or another form of protection over the last 12 months.

Image source, Reuters

Thomas Spencer & Alex Murray
BBC Verify

Image source, Getty Images

Yesterday, we reported on BBC Verify Live how we have been monitoring the movement of 30 US military tanker aircraft as they left bases in America and flew towards Europe.

While some of the flights that headed towards the eastern Mediterranean turned back we noticed several planes landed at the Chania airport on the Greek island of Crete. Other aircraft had already flown directly there from the US on 16 June.

At least five KC-135 tanker aircraft - used to refuel US fighter jets and bombers - have recently landed at Chania, and according to the latest data, are still there.

Col Brendan Kearney - a former chief of staff of US Marine Corps forces in Europe - told BBC Verify the plane’s “refuelling capability is critical for the long distances that the bombers have to cover” and was “a strong indicator that something is up”.

Flight data, external also shows the recent arrival of other significant US military aircraft at Chania in the last few days. They include a C-17 Globemaster transport jet and two RC-135V Rivet Joints which "eavesdrop" on signals and electronic intelligence.

The flights are part of a wider movement of US military assets as speculation continues over American involvement in Israeli strikes on Iran. You can read more here.

Joshua Cheetham
BBC Verify journalist

The BBC along with other international media cannot report from inside Iran so satellite imagery is a key tool for us to see and verify what is happening in Iran as Israel’s attacks continue.

The latest pictures have come to us from the specialist satellite imaging firm Maxar which appear to show extensive damage to Tabriz missile base with at least nine buildings and two tunnel entrances destroyed and several others are heavily damaged.

Maxar’s imaging has also captured potential evidence of strikes against Mashhad airport about 750km (470 miles) east of Tehran. We can see a large aircraft has been destroyed with only the tail left intact.

Another image shows what Maxar describe as Shahed drones stored on trailers and fighter aircraft at Dezful air force base in western Iran.

We’ve shared these images with experts to get a better understanding of what’s been targeted, and what impact this will have on Iran’s military capability.

Tom Edgington
BBC Verify senior journalist

The BBC understands French authorities will bring in new rules next month to allow their police to intercept migrant boats up to 300m (1,000 ft) offshore.

Currently, the French police's operational rules prevent them from wading into the water to prevent boats from making the crossing to the UK (although they are allowed to intervene to stop people drowning).

A BBC reporter in Calais counted 18 French gendarmes watching one boat from the shore without intervening.

The UK government has made a series of pledges on migrant crossings - including “smashing the gangs” behind them.

But despite the pledge, 16,545 people have arrived in the UK in small boats so far in 2025 - up by nearly a third compared with last year and the highest total for this time of year on record.

BBC Verify has been tracking the government’s progress against its illegal migration and asylum pledges, which you can read here.

Peter Mwai
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, Vahid Online

We’ve been sourcing and authenticating videos showing a series of loud explosions overnight in eastern Tehran following another night of Israeli air raids.

The footage we’ve verified shows huge plumes of smoke rising into the night sky above the Iranian capital.

We can tell where the strikes have taken place by looking at physical features in the footage such as mountain ranges and matching them against online mapping services like Google Earth.

In the footage we can see smoke coming from slightly behind the mountain range to the east of Tehran which matches the location of the Khojir missile production complex - an expansive military installation near the town of Hajarabad.

The location also matches heat sources captured by Nasa satellites, external that are used to track wildfires and other thermal signals.

Rob Corp
BBC Verify Live editor

Good morning from the newsroom in London.

We have a number of stories to chase and verify today as the team continues to update and inform the BBC's reporting on the conflict between Iran and Israel.

Because BBC News cannot operate freely in Iran we use verified footage and images to get a better understanding of what is happening in the country.

So today we're looking at:

• Footage posted overnight showing a series of explosions across the capital Tehran as Israel continues to carry out air strikes on what it says are military and nuclear facilities
• What the latest satellite imagery tells us about the impact of Israeli strikes on Iran's weapons development facilities
• The location of US military equipment such as aircraft and warships that have been moved to the region as speculation continues about American military involvement

We'll also be updating our data on the number of English Channel small boat crossings by migrants as the UK government warns the situation is "deteriorating".