Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

If you’re just joining us now, you’ve got a few more minutes before we close this page, so here’s a look at what we’ve been covering today.

The team has been looking into what we can say about the IDF’s assault on Gaza City - including verifying footage of military vehicles on the ground, geolocating videos of an air strike on a tower block and studying exclusive satellite imagery of Gaza City taken today, commissioned by BBC Verify.

If an unusual video crossed your timeline this weekend that seemed to show Donald Trump talking about something called a “medbed”, then you might have been duped by an AI fake. Here’s what we know about the conspiracy theory, which was briefly boosted by the US president himself.

The TV screens at the desks of our fact-checking team have been tuned into Labour conference all day as they look into various claims made by the UK’s governing party. Chancellor Rachel Reeves said she wants to tackle youth unemployment, so we examined which sectors of the economy are in need of workers.

And does the UK really have the fastest growth in the G7?

Plus, we’d love to hear more about your priorities for BBC Verify. Do you have questions that you would like us to answer or investigations you think we should carry out?

It could be a claim from a politicians you want fact-checked, a video you think we should verify or a story we should dig into, here in the UK or from anywhere in the world.

Let us know about the issues you care about by clicking here - and hopefully see you tomorrow.

As Israel’s latest major operation progresses, thousands of people have been forced to escape air strikes and fighting on the ground in Gaza City.

BBC Verify has been tracking sightings of Israeli military vehicles, using both new satellite imagery and in videos recorded by people in the city, as Israeli forces push further into the city.

Merlyn Thomas has been looking into what images and footage can tell us.

Benedict Garman
BBC Verify senior journalist

We’ve been analysing a new satellite image of Gaza City which was captured this morning just before 09:30 local time (07:30 BST).

BBC Verify requested the imagery - known as “tasking the satellite” - so we could monitor the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) advance into Gaza City in close to real time.

We’ve been doing this work alongside our analysis of video footage shared by Palestinian journalists - who film at great personal risk.

However, their footage may show one street in a particular neighbourhood while the satellite gives us a comprehensive overview.

So, for example, in the image below we can see an IDF position towards the north of central Gaza City.

It shows at least 70 armoured vehicles next to buildings that formerly made up al-Mawhobeen School in Sheikh Radwan.

Further south, we see a similar number of vehicles less than 1km from al-Rashid road - the coastal route being used by Palestinians to escape from Gaza City.

These are just some of the larger groupings of vehicles. Since this part of the offensive began on 15 September, we’ve seen the Israeli military progress from the outskirts into the heart of the city in a pincer movement from the north and south.

The points plotted on the map below are locations of troop movements which we’ve confirmed using satellite imagery and verified video circulating on social media - including video shared by the IDF itself.

The red points are locations we’ve newly identified in that day’s satellite imagery and the black points are those that had been previously identified either by satellite or other images.

Daniel Wainwright
BBC Verify senior data journalist

So far for the month of September, 4,483 migrants have arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel in 57 boats, according to Home Office data.

This means that up to yesterday each boat, on average, contained 70 people. With two days’ data still to go in September, this is currently the largest monthly average since the data started being recorded in 2018.

And as that’s an average, it means there are boats where the number of people is much higher, with 125 reported to have arrived in a single vessel over the weekend.

The number of people per boat has been rising over the summer. In May, it was about 58 people per boat on average, while in June, July and August it was more than 60.

The overall annual average is up too. Throughout the whole of 2022 - the year with the previous record for overall small boat arrivals - there were about 41 people per boat on average.

That went up to nearly 49 per boat in 2023 and 53 per boat in 2024. So far for 2025, the average was almost 61 people per boat.

Benedict Garman and Richard Irvine-Brown
BBC Verify

Image source, EPA

Israel does not allow international reporters into Gaza, so at BBC Verify we’ve been using satellite imagery, social media posts by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and footage from Palestinian journalists on the ground to track fighting in Gaza City.

What we’ve learned from these sources is that there has been fighting around al-Shifa hospital in the city’s north-west near the Mediterranean coast.

Last week, a video released by the IDF showed gunfire coming from buildings within the complex of the hospital - although we couldn’t be certain when it was filmed.

As we reported earlier, there has been intense Israeli military activity in the area over the past few days, including air strikes and armoured vehicles on the north-western side of Gaza City, within 1km (0.6 miles) of al-Shifa.

Since then, we have verified:

• A journalist on Sunday reporting from the hospital grounds that Israeli tanks are blocking streets to the north. Distant gunfire can be heard throughout the video
• Reports last night by two journalists, who we verified as being 300m from the hospital yesterday, that the hospital was still working and medics and patients remained there. We confirmed the videos were from the location and posted overnight. But we can’t be certain of when they were filmed
• That a building 250m to the north-east of the hospital has been destroyed. We can see it standing in a satellite image from Saturday and reduced to rubble today
• Footage from this morning which captured the sound of heavy gunfire less than 400m from the hospital. A reverse-image search shows the Instagram copy we worked from was the original, with metadata on the post showing it was uploaded around 05:00 BST (07:00 local time). The weather in the footage matches reports from today.

Shayan Sardarizadeh and Mike Wendling
BBC Verify and BBC News

Over the weekend, US President Donald Trump posted and then deleted a fake video promoting a pseudoscientific product known as “medbeds”.

Medbed - short for medical or meditational bed - is a bogus product not supported by any scientific evidence that is often promoted in fringe conspiratorial corners of the internet as a miraculous healing device that can cure a wide variety of ailments. These baseless theories say that medbeds have been deliberately hidden from the public by global elites.

The video opens with the president’s daughter-in-law and Fox News presenter Lara Trump announcing the launch of “America’s first medbed hospitals” and “a national medbed card”.

The video - which includes Fox News on-screen branding - then cuts to Trump proclaiming that medbeds mark “a new era in American healthcare”.

But the clip - which was shared by Trump’s official account on his social media platform Truth Social - has never appeared on Fox News and and an expert told BBC Verify that the voices of both the president and his daughter-in-law were likely created with artificial intelligence.

Emmanuelle Saliba, chief investigative officer at GetReal Security, a cyber-security firm that analyses deceptive digital media, told BBC Verify that the clip appears to contain “lip sync deepfakes”, meaning that AI-generated audio has been deceptively overlaid on real videos of both Donald and Lara Trump to make them say things they never have.

The BBC visited a so-called “medbed clinic” in Illinois in 2022, where visitor pays a fee to receive healing energy from a medbed for a limited period of time.

When pressed by a BBC reporter, staff at the clinic clarified that while medbeds are not designed to diagnose or treat any medical condition, they offer many “health benefits”.

BBC Verify has approached the White House to ask why the fake video was posted and subsequently deleted by the president.

Ned Davies
BBC Verify analyst

Image source, X

We’ve been verifying images which the Ukrainian armed forces say show the aftermath of a strike at the site of a high-tech manufacturing facility in Russia’s western Bryansk region.

The Ukrainian General Staff said on its Telegram channel, external that the strikes took place today using four missiles launched from 240km (150 miles) away. It said that explosions had been confirmed at the site but it had not fully assessed how much damage was caused.

The Ukrainian navy posted, external to say that domestically produced Neptune missiles were used, an anti-ship weapon which Ukraine has adapted to hit some land targets.

Official sanctions documents, external from Taiwan, the US and Ukraine support the suggestion the site was used by the company Electrodetal for the production of high-tech components with military applications.

Russian news sites claim the company produces parts for 1,500 different companies including those in the military sector.

Russian sources are yet to confirm the strikes on the plant, but late last night the regional governor issued a statement warning, external people in the town of Karachevsk, where the facility is located, that there was a missile threat and residents should remain indoors.

Our analysis confirms the images of smoke and fire first appeared online today and the location matches the address of the company listed in sanctions documents. We do not know the cause of the fire from the images alone.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

We’ve just been reviewing the latest satellite imagery from Gaza City as we track the Israeli military’s offensive there.

Over the weekend, the team verified footage showing an air strike demolishing the Mecca Tower, one of Gaza’s largest buildings.

A side-by-side comparison of an image taken today to one from Saturday shows how the multi-storey apartment block has been levelled by the missile.

The Israeli military has said the building was being used by Hamas and that residents were warned of the attack in advance.

Tamara Kovacevic
BBC Verify senior journalist

We’ve been listening to Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ morning round of broadcast interviews ahead of her Labour Party conference speech at noon.

Reeves was speaking about plans to “abolish long-term youth unemployment” by guaranteeing a paid work placement for young people who have been out of employment or education for 18 months.

On BBC Breakfast, Reeves said young people could get jobs “in the retail sector, they could be in our cultural industries, they could be in government”.

The announcement follows the government’s "youth guarantee", announced last November, which promised every 18 to 21-year-old in England access to an apprenticeship, training, education opportunities or help to find a job.

The latest ONS data, external shows there were 728,000 unfilled job vacancies in the UK for the period covering June to August. Of those, 48,000 were in retail while 29,000 vacancies were in the “public administration and defence and compulsory social security” sector.

There is no heading for “cultural industries” but “arts, entertainment and recreation” had 14,000 vacancies. The highest number of job vacancies – 128,000 – were in health and social care followed by 78,000 in accommodation and food service.

Anthony Reuben
BBC Verify senior journalist

Defending her economic record, UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves claimed earlier on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Our economy was the fastest growing in the G7 in the first half this year.”

The G7 is the group of big industrialised economies that also includes the US, Japan, Germany, France, Italy and Canada. She is correct, with the economy measured by gross domestic product (GDP) having grown 0.7% in the first three months of the year and 0.3% in the second three months.

If you look at different time periods, however, you get a different picture. The UK was not the fastest growing in the G7 in the year to the end of June, for example.

The figures for April to June may be revised by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) - the organisation which produces the UK’s officials statistics.

You can read more about it here and follow Reeves's speech in text and video live on the BBC News live page.

Emma Pengelly and Paul Brown
BBC Verify

Image source, EPA

Since Friday evening, we’ve verified multiple videos from Gaza, many showing military activity close to the coast on the western side of Gaza City in the north of the Strip. We’ve pinpointed where they were filmed and checked their recency.

• On Friday afternoon, a video of the aftermath of a claimed shelling on al-Shati camp showed debris and smoke filling a road strewn with furniture. Two injured adult men and a child were seen being carried away while two more children were filmed in an ambulance. Two videos captured a kilometre to the south shows the aftermath of a claimed strike on the al-Nono building, with people trying to reach at least two bodies in the rubble, plus one man and one woman being carried away on stretchers
• On Saturday, we identified projectiles hitting and destroying two buildings closer to the coast. We also verified a video of people being taken to al-Shifa hospital. Meanwhile, three videos filmed at the market in Nuseirat in central Gaza show bodies on the ground and people trying to help after a reported Israeli strike
• Another video showed a projectile hitting and demolishing a building, the Mecca Tower in the south-west of Gaza City, on Sunday. Three videos of tanks, one including a bulldozer, were located to al-Nasser Street.

Additional verification by Benedict Garman and Richard Irvine-Brown

Kayleen Devlin, Emma Pengelly and Joshua Cheetham
BBC Verify

After authorities in Michigan named the suspect in yesterday’s Mormon church attack, in which at least four people were killed, we began searching for information about him and his family.

The suspect, 40-year-old Thomas Jacob Sanford, was a US Marine Corps veteran.

A 2007 article in a local Michigan newspaper reported he had been stationed in Japan and was soon due to join his battalion in Fallujah, Iraq - as well as noting that both his uncle and grandfather served in the military.

A photo of a truck at the scene of the shooting covered in rubble, showed a numberplate with “Iraq” written across it, which matched images posted on his mother’s Facebook page where the words “Iraq veteran” can be clearly seen.

She also shared photos of Sanford in uniform in 2023, noting he served from 2004 to 2008 and was an “Iraq veteran”.

No motive has yet been identified and we found no evidence Sanford had ties to the Mormon church. His Facebook page has since been removed, but other accounts linked to family members suggest support for President Donald Trump.

In 2019, an image was posted of Sanford in a Trump re-election shirt - and in 2021 his wife used the hashtag “bring back Trump”.

We also identified Sanford’s residence. Street view images from June 2025 show a Trump campaign sign outside the property.

Rob Corp
BBC Verify Live editor

BBC Verify is dedicated to examining the facts and claims behind a story to try to determine whether or not it is true - whether that’s a political statement, a video shared on social media, or images from a war zone.

And we’re also keen to hear from you - is there something you think we should investigate? We're particularly interested in claims you have heard or seen that maybe don’t seem right.

Or perhaps you’ve come across something online and want to know if it was created using AI or even a deepfake.

You can send your suggestions to the team here.

Rob Corp
BBC Verify Live editor

Welcome to BBC Verify Live where today we’re examining videos posted from Gaza City to piece together the progress of the Israeli military’s ground offensive there.

We’ve been verifying footage being shared by local journalists over the last two days showing the aftermath of attacks in the west of the city. Videos have also been shared of Israeli tanks and bulldozers operating in the city’s streets. Israel says Gaza City is a major stronghold of Hamas - the armed group that runs the Strip and which led the 7 October 2023 attack on southern Israel, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

Elsewhere we’ve been looking through publicly available information, including social media accounts, to learn more about the man suspected of carrying out yesterday’s attack at a Mormon church in the US state of Michigan that killed at least four people. We’re looking to see what online posts tell us about the suspect who has been identified as 40-year-old Thomas Jacob Sanford.

In the UK, our fact-check team is preparing for Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s speech to the governing Labour Party’s conference at 12:00 BST.

Plus we’re keeping an eye on the latest reports from the war between Ukraine and Russia and also any new reports of drone activity in northern Europe following reported sightings in Denmark, Germany, Norway and Lithuania over the weekend.