Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

BBC Verify Live will be closing for the week shortly, but you’ll continue to see verification and fact-checking coverage from our teams in London and Washington DC across the BBC this weekend.

Today we’ve been focusing on the small Taiwanese town of Guangfu where at least 15 people have been killed after Super Typhoon Ragasa burst the banks of an upstream lake causing a devastating torrent of water to flood the town. As Taiwanese officials continue to search for the missing, we’ve been using satellite imagery to measure the extent of the damage.

We’ve also used satellite images over Iran to show evidence of construction work at key nuclear sites targeted by Israel and the US in July, verified footage of fighters from the Rapid Support Forces at a key army base near the besieged Sudanese city of el-Fasher, and tracked Benjamin Netanyahu’s unusual flight route to the UN ahead of his speech today.

In the UK, we’ve monitored a new data release that has revised the UK population up by more than a quarter of a million and shown how polling for both Labour and the Conservatives has hit 40 year lows.

Plus, watch Ros Atkins break down the UK’s new digital ID plan.

Thanks for joining us this week. BBC Verify Live will be back on Monday morning.

Barbara Metzler
BBC Verify senior data scientist

Today we’ve been reviewing satellite imagery showing the impact of flooding on the town of Guangfu in eastern Taiwan.

The area was hit by torrents of water after rainfall from Super Typhoon Ragasa caused a lake to burst its banks upstream. At least 15 people were killed.

I’ve been using new satellite pictures from before and after this week to measure the extent of the flooding.

I used a computer vision change detection technique to analyse the difference between the pictures from before and after the flood. I set pixel intensity thresholds to automatically identify significant changes in pixel colour, and then I highlighted in purple the pixels that have changed the most.

That allows us to see clearly where the river was the most engorged by excess water, map which parts of Guangfu were the hardest hit, and measure how far the floodwater reached into the town from the river.

Daniel Wainwright
BBC Verify senior data journalist

As Labour head to their conference this weekend and the Tories the weekend after that, the opinion polls make for alarming reading for both the government and opposition.

Neither party has been this unpopular in the past 40 years of opinion polling.

An average of polls across Great Britain since 1 September, asking people who they’d vote for in a general election, had Labour on about 21%. For the Conservatives, it was about 17%.

We analysed historical polling data from PollBase, external, run by the Lib Dem peer Lord Pack, and fed that into our own poll tracker that has been monitoring voting intention since before the last election.

The last time both parties were almost this deep in the electoral doldrums was summer 2019 when Parliament was unable to agree on a Brexit deal.

Even then, both parties had slightly more support than they do now.

Labour’s previous worst month for public support was May 2009, while for the Tories - if you exclude the time around last year’s general election - you’d have to go back to 1995.

The big beneficiary of this fall in Labour and Conservative support is Reform UK.

If a general election were held tomorrow, polls in the two weeks up to 24 September suggest about three in 10 voters in Great Britain would back them - more than double the vote share they received last time.

Rob England
BBC Verify senior data journalist

The UK government’s plan to introduce digital IDs partly reflects its desire to “tackle illegal immigration”.

It is hoped that digital IDs will make it harder for people to come to the UK illegally and “disappear” into the so-called informal economy, according to ministers.

But how does illegal immigration in any one year - such as small boat crossings - compare with legal migration such as work and study visas?

Overall, excluding tourists, there were about 850,000 visas granted in the year to June 2025 according to official figures. Most were study and work visas.

Meanwhile, 49,341 people were detected entering the UK without permission, external - including small boat crossings. The Home Office says these figures do not account for people who arrived undetected.

As you can see in the chart below, the number of irregular arrivals is much less than those who come to the UK with legal permission.

Barbara Metzler, Ghoncheh Habibiazad and Shayan Sardarizadeh
BBC Verify

Three months after US and Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites, new satellite images show signs of construction work at two of its key enrichment facilities.

An analysis of high-resolution satellite imagery captured by Maxar Technologies on 18 September reveals work on a new perimeter and tunnel south of the Natanz enrichment complex.

Multiple construction vehicles are visible in an area south of the complex while digging work appears to be underway. Images also show work to extend a perimeter around that same area.

Natanz is Iran’s primary nuclear enrichment facility which houses hundreds of centrifuges deep underground. It was struck by both Israel and the US during the 12-day war in June, resulting in damage to several overground buildings.

Meanwhile, satellite images captured by Maxar of the Fordo enrichment complex on 23 September show that six craters, which were previously spotted following US strikes, have now been covered. Tunnel entrances that were damaged after US and Israeli attacks appear to remain blocked.

Fordo, which is hidden deep into mountainside, was targeted by US Air Force B-2 stealth bombers on 22 June, before being struck again by Israel a day later.

The head of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran, Mohammad Eslami, told Sky News this week that Tehran is committed to rebuilding its nuclear facilities, external.

The UK government's plan to introduce a digital ID scheme is the latest development in a long-running debate about identity cards.

BBC analysis editor Ros Atkins looks at what the government hopes this will achieve - and why it's already facing criticism.

Produced by Katerina Karelli.

Robert Cuffe and Daniel Wainwright
BBC Verify

As part of today’s data release on the UK population in 2024, the ONS has revised its figures for previous years. Its estimate for the UK’s population in 2023 is now 260,000 higher.

The biggest single reason for the change is international migration that year - how much of it there was and how it was measured.

The UK saw record levels of migration in 2023. This was going on at the same time that the ONS was building a new system to count migrants based on admin data - things like visas, national insurance numbers, tax and student records.

Every update to that huge IT and modelling project led to changed figures. For example, late in 2024, the ONS added 40,000 more Ukraine visa entrants when they got new data from the Home Office.

Another 80,000 were added when they started tying together different visas to work out whether someone had left the country when their permission to be here expired or switched to a long-term visa.

These changes, and others like them, added up to a substantial revision.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

We’re expecting to hear Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speak at the United Nations General Assembly at 14:00 BST.

We’ve been looking into online posts that have been questioning the route his official aircraft took to get to New York.

Flight-tracking data shows that the Wing of Zion, the principal Israeli state plane, left Tel Aviv and flew the length of the Mediterranean Sea to the Strait of Gibraltar before heading across the Atlantic.

While the route did take the aircraft through Greek and Italian airspace it avoided other European countries like France and Spain, adding around 663km (412 miles) to the length of the flight and extending the journey by about two hours compared with direct commercial flights from Tel Aviv to New York.

There have been widespread claims online that this route was selected to avoid countries that might enforce an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant against Netanyahu for alleged war crimes. Netanyahu has firmly denied the allegations.

Signatories to the ICC statute, which include France, Spain, the UK and Republic of Ireland, could be legally required to arrest Netanyahu and surrender him to The Hague-based court if he enters their territory.

Flight-tracking records show Netanyahu’s plane routinely flew over France before the arrest warrant was issued in November 2024.

Relations between Netanyahu and French President Emmanuel Macron have deteriorated in recent months as France has joined the UK, Canada and Australia in recognising Palestinian statehood.

French diplomatic sources, however, have told BBC Verify that “France authorised the Israeli prime minister's flight to overfly its territory,” but that the route ultimately taken was at the discretion of the Israeli authorities.

Spain, which recognised a Palestinian state last year, announced last week that it would support the ICC's investigations by establishing a team to gather evidence of alleged human rights abuses in Gaza, according to the country’s attorney general.

The Spanish foreign ministry declined to comment when we asked them what, if any, action it would have taken if Netanyahu’s flight had entered its airspace.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

We can bring you a few more satellite pictures now showing the impact of massive flooding that hit the Taiwanese town of Guangfu after Super Typhoon Ragasa burst the banks of a lake.

Floodwater rose as high as the second floor of a house in some places and was about one floor deep in the town centre.

Many of the 15 confirmed victims were elderly and most of their bodies were found on the ground floor of their homes, according to local media.

Earlier in the week we verified footage from Guangfu, where 12,000 people live, showing a car being swept down a street by several feet of muddy and fast-flowing water.

Using new satellite imagery, we can now see the aftermath of this flooding from above, with gray mud clear to see on the streets, parks and houses of the town.

Hualien county authorities issued warnings and evacuated about 7,000 people on Monday, a day before Ragasa passed the island. The evacuation was "not mandatory" and officials only called on the public to go to higher ground, a local councillor told the BBC.

After the Matai’an Creek barrier lake was breached, officials had expected it would take the floodwater two hours to reach inhabited areas downstream, but within an hour, vast quantities of water were pouring through Guangfu.

Paul Brown
BBC Verify senior journalist

Another Russian oil refinery was attacked overnight in what is becoming a near-daily occurrence.

Local officials reported a fire at the Afipsky refinery in the southern Krasnodar Krai region which they say was started by falling debris during a drone attack.

A still image being shared on social media shows flames at a facility whose features match pre-existing images of the Afipsky refinery. We've found no cached versions of the picture uploaded before today which suggests it is a recent upload.

The same facility was hit on 28 August in a strike claimed by Ukraine's Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR).Meanwhile, we've also seen evidence of the result of a strike on another Russian oil refinery earlier this week.

As we reported on Wednesday, footage from the town of Salavat showed a major fire burning in the direction of the Gazprom facility.

Satellite imagery captured by Planet Labs the same day shows a column of smoke rising from the facility.

Image source, Planet Labs PBC

Robert Cuffe and Christine Jeavans
BBC Verify

Estimates just published by the Office for National Statistics show the UK population in 2024 was 69.3 million people - an increase of 755,300 (1.1%) on the UK’s population in 2023. It’s the second-largest annual numerical increase for over 75 years. The largest rise was in the previous year.

Almost all of the increase was due to migration which increased the UK’s population by nearly 740,000.

There was slight “natural growth” in population due to there being 16,000 more births than deaths.

The effect on population change from migration was highest for England and lowest for Northern Ireland.

Natural growth also varied by nation, with Wales and Scotland seeing slightly more deaths than births.

Peter Mwai
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, Telegram

I have verified video footage showing fighters from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) at a key army base west of the besieged city of el-Fasher, the capital of Sudan’s North Darfur region.

This armoured corps base is located just east of the city’s airport and has been under the control of the army since the beginning of the war in 2023.

I verified the video by matching the buildings seen in the footage - including a black patch on one of the roofs - along with the trees and electricity poles in the clip with what can be found on satellite imagery on Google Earth. The men filming also mention the location.

Reverse image search indicates the video first appeared online yesterday.The capture of the base is a major gain for the paramilitary group as it attempts to take control of el-Fasher, the last army stronghold in the wider Darfur region.

The RSF have besieged the city for more than a year.The main army headquarters in the city, 6th Infantry Division Command, is located 1.5km (0.9 miles) north-east of the armoured corps base where the RSF has also been advancing. They were last filmed fighting at a location roughly 360m (1,200 ft) from the headquarters.

Thomas Copeland and Yi Ma
BBC Verify

We’ve been reviewing some new satellite images taken yesterday that show the devastating impact of Super Typhoon Ragasa on Taiwan.

The township of Guangfu in the eastern county of Hualien has been hit particularly hard after heavy rainfall from this week’s storm breached the Matai’an Creek barrier lake 11km (7 miles) upstream. It was formed just a few months ago after a series of landslides.

The lake holds around 91 million tonnes of water, enough to fill 36,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. About three-quarters of that water was released suddenly after the lake burst its banks. At least 15 people were killed and nine others remain unaccounted for.

The force of the water unleashed by the lake bursting could be compared to a tsunami, an expert has told the BBC.

Earlier this week we brought you verified drone footage of Matai’an Creek Bridge, just north of Guangfu which was submerged under the fast flowing water released from the lake.

In this side-by-side comparison of satellite images from before and after the typhoon, we can now clearly see the bridge has been completely washed away with just six vertical supports still standing.

In this second set of images we can see that an area of fields, trees and small buildings next to the riverbank has now been completely submerged in mud and silt.

Rob Corp
BBC Verify Live editor

Good morning - welcome to Friday's BBC Verify Live.

We'll bring you updates here on what the team is working on, showing how they gather and authenticate material which we'll use in our own investigations and share with the BBC's news teams here in the UK and in our bureaux overseas.

Last night the specialist satellite imagery firm Maxar sent out new pictures showing severe flooding in Taiwan after Super Typhoon Ragasa passed close to the island earlier this week.

We can see from the images how the streets of Gangfu in eastern Taiwan have been left covered in mud after a deadly wall of floodwater swept down a mountainside and inundated the town.

Other stories we're working on today include:

• Verifying footage that appears to show paramilitaries from the Rapid Support Forces close to the airport in el-Fasher - a Sudanese city the RSF has besieged for more than a year during the country's civil war
• Investigating reports that another Russian oil refinery came under attack last night at Krasnodar - video is circulating that we're checking
• UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is due to speak later this morning about plans to introduce ID cards which the government says will help tackle illegal migration - our data and fact-check teams are looking into that

We'll also update you later on other investigations we're working on today and you can get in touch with BBC Verify by following this link.