Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

We’re closing this live page shortly, but you’ll continue to see our coverage across BBC News through the rest of the day.

Our fact-checkers began the day by listening to Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, set out his party’s plans to tackle illegal immigration.

Our team of fact-checkers and data journalists added context, examined how many unauthorised immigrants are in the country, how much migrant returns flights cost, and what immigration detention capacity the UK has.

During the afternoon we brought you verified footage of the double strike on Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, fires at a train station in Crimea and images after a Russian attack that killed a mine worker in Ukraine.

For more of our videos, analysis and investigations head to the BBC Verify pages on the BBC website.

Thomas Copeland and Richard Irvine-Brown
BBC Verify

Image source, X

We’ve been reviewing stills and videos from the eastern Donetsk region of Ukraine after reports of a Russian attack near a coal mine.

One worker was killed and three were injured in the strike, according to Ukraine’s Ministry of Energy and the mine’s owner, the DTEK energy company.

The attack temporarily trapped 148 miners underground as well as damaging buildings and equipment, the company said.

We have verified a picture of black smoke rising from the mine by matching roads, trees, buildings and features in the landscape with satellite imagery.

The image has not been publicly available online before this morning. The photographer was standing north of the mine when the picture was taken and we can see the wind is blowing the smoke eastwards.

We also used this information to help verify a video which shows smoke rising into the air from a distance. The direction of the smoke plumes indicate this video was taken from south of the mine. We then matched other features including telegraph poles and a pylon with satellite imagery.

Like the picture, the video appears to have first been posted publicly slightly after 13:30 local time (11:30 BST). The weather, patchy cloud moving eastwards, is also a match for that time today.

Image source, X

Ben Chu
BBC Verify policy and analysis correspondent

Farage has pledged to deport up to 600,000 illegal immigrants if his party are elected to government.

But what do people think about the kind of policies Reform UK is proposing and what is their perception of how much immigration to the UK is illegal?

A recent YouGov poll asked people: “How much would you support or oppose: Admitting no more new migrants and requiring large numbers of migrants who came to the UK in recent years to leave?”

45% said they would support, to some degree, such a policy while 44% said they would oppose it.

But the same poll suggested that almost half of Britons think there are more migrants staying in the UK illegally rather than legally.

The aren’t recent credible estimates of the current number of unauthorised migrants in the country, though one from 2017 put it between 670,000 and 810,000.

The number of the foreign-born people in the UK with a legal right to be here was just under 11 million in the 2021 census.

So, there is a substantial mismatch between many people’s perception about the relative size of the population of illegal and legal migrants and the reality.

And the same polling shows people often have a much more favourable view of legal migrants.

Peter Mwai
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, Telegram/Astra Press

We have verified two images said to show fires at a railway station in Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014, following reported Ukrainian drone attacks earlier today.In the images, which are filmed next to the railway tracks, smoke can be seen rising at a distance.

We have confirmed they were filmed at the railway station in Krasnohvardiiske in central Crimea. We matched the buildings, trees, layout of the railway tracks and a footbridge as seen in the images with publicly available satellite imagery on Google Maps and the Russian search engine Yandex.

While the images were taken from locations on different sides of the tracks we can see some of the same objects including a train.

Ukraine’s military, in a statement on Telegram, external, says its special forces carried out attacks in Crimea “as a result of which the logistics facilities that ensure the functioning and combat supply of military units of the Russian army were put out of action”.

The statement has not revealed details of the exact locations that were targeted. Russia’s defence ministry says it destroyed eight drones, external over the skies of Crimea this morning.

Do the numbers cited by Reform in presenting their deportation plans stand up to scrutiny?

BBC Verify's Ben Chu has been taking a look.

Paul Brown
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, Telegram/PlanetLabs PBC

We’ve confirmed that a photograph being shared on Palestinian social media showing Israeli tanks, armoured vehicles and diggers gathering near Gaza City is the same location that BBC Verify identified on satellite imagery last week.

New satellite imagery from the area shows vehicles spread out across an area measuring around 500 sq m. Two other groups of armoured vehicles are stationed around 1.3km to the north-west.

And in the vicinity of these locations there is clear evidence of the ongoing demolition of buildings.

The image below shows the same location on 23 and 26 August. While the area was already clearly damaged we can see that several buildings have been flattened in a short space of time.In fact, the satellite has caught sight of smoke rising from one the buildings (see top centre).

Image source, PlanetLabs PBC

Sebastian Vandermeersch
BBC Verify

Image source, Reuters

New footage has emerged that shows yesterday’s double strike on Nasser Hospital in the city of Khan Younis. The moment was captured by Palestinian photojournalist Hatem Khaled who was a contractor for the Reuters news agency.

In the video, Red Crescent workers can be seen standing on a hospital staircase beside the covered bodies of people who were killed in the first strike, which took place approximately nine minutes earlier. The footage then captures the moment of the second strike - a loud explosion is heard before smoke and dust engulfs the scene.

We confirmed the footage came from Khaled as he was also seen on live TV coverage of the attack filming from the staircase on his phone - and what he can be seen filming matches with the video we’ve seen.

In a separate video filmed later, Khaled appears badly injured inside Nasser Hospital, wearing the same red shirt as seen in his footage. An online facial recognition comparison with photos of him from his Instagram account further confirmed his identity.

Tamara Kovacevic
BBC Verify senior journalist

Responding to a question from a journalist earlier about Reform UK’s plans to deport illegal migrants, party leader Nigel Farage said: “Germany now has this mass of deportation flights going, including to Iran I think."

We asked the German interior ministry how many Iranians it has removed. “From January to July 2025, 11 Iranians have been deported to Iran. In 2024, 14 Iranians were deported to Iran. We do not possess further information on the individual cases,” a spokesperson told us.

Last week we checked a claim by Richard Tice, Reform’s deputy leader, that Germany is returning Afghan nationals who entered illegally back to Afghanistan.

We found that since 2021, when the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, there were two flights from Germany to Afghanistan. Eighty-one were returned this year and 28 last year - all Afghan men who had committed crimes in Germany.

Ben Chu
BBC Verify policy and analysis correspondent

Speaking earlier at Reform UK's press conference announcing the party's policies on illegal migration, the party's Zia Yusuf said that deporting some 500,000 to 600,000 people over the next Parliament would cost £10bn but save £17bn - making a net saving of £7bn over five years.

We don't have a detailed costing document from Reform so it’s not possible to verify this - the six-page document they have put out only has these headline figures and no breakdown, for instance, on the cost of building 24,000 immigration removal centre detention places.

But it is worth noting these costings would, in any case, be subject to very high uncertainty because any savings would depend on the deterrent effect of the programme in terms of discouraging asylum seekers and unauthorised migrants from attempting to come to the UK in the future.

When the previous Conservative government asked civil servants to deliver an overall costing of its Rwanda plan in 2023 - which would have involved sending unauthorised arrivals to the African country - they said there were simply unable to do so because it would be impossible to judge how much of a deterrent this “novel and untested” scheme would be.

Image source, PA Media

Lucy Gilder
BBC Verify journalist

Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf pledged at the party’s news conference this morning to increase the UK’s immigration detention capacity to hold 24,000 people.

This would form part of Reform’s plans to detain and deport hundreds of thousands of people who enter the UK illegally.

The current UK detention system only has space for a few thousand people.

As of April 2024 there were approximately 2,500 detention spaces, a Home Office official told a committee of MPs, external. He added that a “further 1,000 [spaces] are coming online”.

The two detention centres that will create this extra capacity - Campsfield in Oxfordshire and Haslar in Hampshire - are still under development.

A little over 1,800 people were held in detention at the end of June 2025, according to the latest Home Office figures, external.

In the year ending June 2025, nearly 21,700 people entered immigration detention, a number which has continued to rise since 2023 but is still below levels seen a decade ago.

Tamara Kovacevic
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, EPA

We’ve been listening to Reform UK leader Nigel Farage’s speech on tackling illegal migration. He spoke for a short while before handing over to Zia Yusuf, the head of the party’s Department of Government Efficiency, to give details about their plan aimed at stopping illegal migration.

Yusuf said: "The total number of illegal immigrants in the country now stands at at least a million.”

The Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford says, external that the term unauthorised migrant - also referred to as “illegal immigrants” - is typically applied to people who enter the country illegally, those who overstay their visa, people who are refused asylum but remain in the country and children born in the UK to “unauthorised” parents. They are not allowed to work or eligible for housing or benefits.

It is very difficult to measure the size of this type of immigration and the government does not have an accurate overall figure.

An estimate by the US think tank Pew Research, external published in 2019 suggested there approximately 800,000 to 1.2 million illegal migrants in the UK in 2017.

However, migration experts noted this number was inflated because it included a large number of people with “indefinite leave to remain” status - meaning they can legally live without restrictions but don't have a British passport and citizenship.

In response, in March 2025, Pew revised its estimated figures for the UK in 2017 for unauthorised migrants to 700,000 to 900,000., external

This post has been updated to reflect that Pew has revised its estimate for the number of unauthorised migrants in the UK.

Lucy Gilder
BBC Verify journalist

Image source, PA Media

Reform UK says it's planning to run five migrant returns flights per day as part of its ambition to deport people who arrive in the UK illegally.

It says this and other measures in the plan will cost £10bn over five years but that money would be saved by not housing asylum seekers in hotels.

There’s not a huge amount of publicly available information about the cost of migrant return flights.

A recent Home Office assessment, external - which looked at the economic impact of the previous government’s Illegal Migration Bill - estimated that it would cost £22,000 per person being returned to a third country.

It said that this cost “includes their removal flight as well as the contract for resource to monitor and transport individuals from detention to any legal court sittings, from detention to the flight for removal, and onboard the flight to the recipient safe third country”.

We haven’t seen the full detail of Reform’s plan yet but the party has indicated people would be returned to their home countries and that third countries would also be considered.

In the first year of the current government, 66 chartered returns flights were recorded by the Home Office, external, up from 63 in the same period the year before.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

Image source, PA Media

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage is speaking about his party’s plans to tackle illegal immigration and our fact-check team is listening to what he has to say and will verify any claims he makes.

With four MPs, Reform UK is a small force in the Commons, but polling suggests its popularity has grown significantly.

As is typical for high-profile political speeches, some of the contents has already been trailed in the media.

In this case, Farage has written in the Daily Telegraph about his plans, external if his party wins power at the next general election.

Here are three policies we are now expecting to hear more about in today’s speech:

• A legal obligation on the UK home secretary to remove people who arrive illegally
• Banning migrants who enter the UK illegally from ever being able to claim asylum
• Leaving the the European Convention on Human Rights, repealing the Human Rights Act and disapplying three other international treaties

Labour say the plans lack substance on delivery and the Conservatives argue that Reform UK are recycling their ideas.

• Read more: Nigel Farage says illegal migration is a 'scourge'

Rob Corp
BBC Verify Live editor

This morning the BBC Verify team is following-up on yesterday's double Israeli strike on a hospital in southern Gaza that reportedly killed at least 20 people, including five journalists.

Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu has described Monday's attack as a "tragic mishap”. We’ll explain what happened based on material we’ve verified.

Our fact-check team will be across a speech by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage this morning where he is expected to outline his party's plans to tackle small boats crossings. We'll look initially at the background to Reform's plans and then update you here during and after the speech.

Elsewhere we're seeing reports of an attack on an oil refinery in Russian-occupied Crimea and will be gathering and verifying material to report on what we know.

You can get in touch with us by following this link.