Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

We’ve spent much of today focused on Afghanistan after Pakistan conducted strikes on two provinces and the capital of Kabul in response to a major offensive against Pakistani military posts announced by the Taliban. Our work has split into three parts:

• Verifying real footage showing strikes in the Afghan provinces of Kandahar and Paktia and tracer fire over Kabul
• Analysing satellite images showing clear signs of damage two locations in Kabul, as well as sites in Kandahar and Gardiz
• Debunking AI fakes and old footage claiming to show downed Pakistan jets

Here in the UK, our fact-checking team have been digging into leader Zack Polanski’s claims about wealth taxes in Switzerland and Labour’s claim that Nigel Farage was responsible for the £350m bus claim during the Brexit referendum campaign following the Gorton and Denton by-election.

BBC Verify will be back with you first thing on Monday morning, so please do join us then.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

We’ve been tracking the USS Gerald R Ford as its deployment now extends to 247 days. This week we’ve kept you updated on reports that the world’s largest warship was facing plumbing issues.

Around the time of the claims, there were also old videos circulating online claiming to show overflowing toilets on board, which we debunked.

The US Navy released a statement on Thursday addressing some of these claims. The statement said: “In recent weeks, media reports have raised concerns regarding shipboard systems, including sanitation.”

“On a ship this size, with this many Sailors, clogs will occur,” said Captain David Skarosi, the commanding officer of the carrier.

“In most instances,” Skarosi added, “clogs are the result of items being flushed that should not be introduced into the system”. Any plumbing issues are quickly resolved “with no impact to operational readiness”, he said.

Admiral Daryl Caudle also addressed the reports of low crew morale on board in the Navy’s statement. “Extended deployments demand endurance,” the chief of naval operations said. “They ask Sailors to miss births, anniversaries, and everyday moments at home.”

BBC Verify on Tour reached Glasgow this week, where we had the opportunity to meet nearly 200 teenagers to discuss disinformation, AI, verification and everything in-between.

The students put us through our paces with tough questions and new ways of thinking about how we deliver news to younger audiences.

Thanks to our hosts at the University of Strathclyde, the BBC Academy for making everything run smoothly and, most importantly, to the kids who showed up ready to listen, engage, challenge and contribute.

Paul Brown
BBC Verify senior journalist

Pakistan’s “very precise” strikes on buildings and other infrastructure at select areas in Afghanistan appears to be largely confined to military sites, according to analysts at the intelligence firm Maiar.

In Kabul, two buildings have been hit with strikes, one of which appears to be a military headquarters or command and control centre, according to Maiar’s analysts. The vehicles parked up nearby indicate the building was most likely occupied, they added.

Image source, Planet Labs PBC

Similarly, in Kandahar, we've seen damage to at least two buildings within a large complex. These buildings were unlikely to be used for ammunition storage as they were close together with no banks between them, making them more likely to be a headquarters of some kind, the analysts stated.

In all cases, Maiar analysts say the targets may be former Nato facilities now being used by the Taliban following the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.

Sarah Jalali
BBC Monitoring

We’ve been monitoring the spread of anti-government protests at Iranian universities, which were reported at 13 of them earlier this week. Since then at least 16 universities across the country have told students they will holding classses online until late March or early April.

Students have reported receiving messages from faculty stating their classes are being held remotely either over concerns for their wellbeing during Ramadan or with no reason given.

State media news channel IRIB reported on a pro-government rally at Qom university yesterday, with clips of students waving the Iranian flag and chanting “Allahu Akbar” (God is great).

Image source, Telegram

Anthony Reuben
BBC Verify senior journalist

As part of its campaign for votes in the Gorton and Denton by-election, Labour used a red bus bearing the slogan: “Remember the £350m a week for our NHS? You can’t trust Farage.”

They were referring to the bus used during the Brexit referendum campaign in 2016, which said: “We send the EU £350m a week - let’s fund our NHS instead”.

At the time, that claim was widely criticised as being inaccurate, including by BBC fact-checkers.

The original bus carried the logo of Vote Leave, a cross-party campaign headed by Conservative ministers Boris Johnson and Michael Gove.

Image source, Getty Images

However, Nigel Farage was not part of Vote Leave, which was chosen by the Electoral Commission as the official Leave Campaign instead of the UKIP-backed Grassroots Out, which Farage supported.

He said during the campaign: "Every time I try to work with them I am rebuffed and rejected".

Farage did criticise the amount of money the UK sent to the EU - he told BBC Question Time just before the referendum that it was £34m a day - but he wasn’t responsible for the slogan on the bus.

Asked about the £350m claim on the morning of the referendum result he told ITV’s Good Morning Britain, external: “I would never have made that claim and that was one of the mistakes that the Leave campaign made”.

Richard Irvine-Brown and Barbara Metzler
BBC Verify journalists

We’ve been tracking the progress of the USS Gerald R Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier.

We’ve observed it moving from the Caribbean last month to Gibraltar last week and yesterday it left Souda Bay in Crete, apparently heading for the eastern Mediterranean as the US builds up military assets close to Iran.

There have been livestreams running all day at the Israeli port of Haifa watching for its arrival, but new satellite imagery shows it is still almost 700km (409 miles) away from the Israeli coast as of 8.48 am GMT today.

This image shows the USS Gerald R Ford apparently turning in a circle to the north, still closer to Crete than Israel.

Justin Crump, CEO of risk intelligence firm Sibylline, says that having the aircraft carrier in the eastern Mediterranean could allow the US to deploy air cover against missiles and drones over Israel, Lebanon and Syria

It would also be well placed to take on threats from Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthi forces from Yemen and other Iranian proxies operating in Iraq, Crump told BBC Verify.

“This forms part of a layered capability stretching from the other carrier group off Iran, throughout the Gulf, in Jordan and Israel, and now in the eastern Mediterranean,” Crump says.

Richard Irvine-Brown
BBC Verify journalist

Amid old and AI-generated images circulating of Pakistan’s strikes on Afghanistan, we have verified a video of what appears to be tracer fire over Kabul.

The tracer fire, which creates a visible trail in the sky to help shooters adjust their aim, is seen in the video being fired upwards into sky from the southwest area of the city.

Using the towers in the video we have located the tracer fire to near the junction of Shahid Road and Butcher Street, which matches the watermark in the bottom left of the footage, roughly 5km (three miles) south of Kabul International Airport.

Although the larger watermark suggests the time the video was taken is unknown, by reverse-searching clips from the footage we found the earliest version uploaded online was from around 6.30am in Kabul (2.30am GMT) today.

Image source, Instagram

Daniel Wainwright
BBC Verify senior data journalist

The Green Party had a historic win in the Gorton and Denton by-election last night. Reform came second overall with Labour polling third, followed by the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.

Recent opinion polls for general election voter intention across the UK have seen the Greens and Lib Dems in a tight race.

Some polls suggest the Greens are ahead of the Lib Dems but the average gap between them is too small to say for certain.

For example, YouGov’s latest poll has the Greens on 17% compared with the Lib Dems on 14%, while More in Common puts the Lib Dems on 14% to the Greens’ 11%, and the Good Growth Foundation has them neck and neck on 12% each.

Polls differ for various reasons, because pollsters interview different people and ask the questions their own way. They apply “weights” to try to make results reflect the population. And they have their own methods for dealing with people who say they do not know how they’d vote, or may not vote at all.

BBC Verify’s poll tracker estimates the level of support for each party by taking a rolling average of their results over the previous fortnight.

That puts the Greens on an average of 14%, just ahead of the Lib Dems’ average of 13%. But it is too close to say for certain because polling companies always warn of a margin of error, meaning they think the real position could be several percentage points higher or lower.

The data covers the whole of Great Britain, which is why the SNP and Plaid Cymru are so low as they only campaign in Scotland and Wales respectively.

Jake Horton and Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify journalists

Alongside the real videos we’ve verified of Pakistan’s strikes on Afghanistan last night, we’ve also found multiple examples of old footage of previous explosions or downed jets being falsely presented as new.

For example, one photo claiming to show the burning wreckage of a Pakistan fighter jet in daylight has been posted by several accounts on X, gaining hundreds of thousands of combined views.

But the picture is not related to the current conflict with Afghanistan and is actually from last year.

Image source, X

We found this out by doing a reverse image search of the picture, a key tool which shows us all the times when an image has previously appeared online. The earliest version we could find of the picture was from May 2025.

We’ve also seen a widely circulated video that claims to show a large explosion and a cloud of smoke rising over Afghanistan’s capital Kabul.

But reverse images searches indicate that this footage is actually a clip from a longer video of air strikes in Iraq’s capital of Baghdad in 2003.

Image source, Facebook

Emma Pengelly and Farida Elsebai
BBC Verify

A Ukrainian school struck by Russia on Tuesday - the fourth anniversary of its full-scale invasion - was also hit days earlier, a teacher has told BBC Verify.

We had already verified and geolocated footage of the incident at the Pokrovske school, in the south-eastern Dnipropetrovsk region.

Image source, Telegram

Now a teacher at the school, Yana Siletska-Vasylieva, has told us the school’s windows and doors were blown out, the roof was destroyed and the cafeteria and sports hall ruined in the latest attack.

And she said the school’s boiler house was also destroyed in a separate strike days earlier.

No children or staff were in the school, which had been providing lessons online. Ms Siletska-Vasylieva said people evacuated the town several months earlier, due to the intensity of Russian attacks and its proximity to the frontline.

Tom Gould
BBC Verify journalist

Pakistan‘s defence minister has said the country is in "open war" with Afghanistan after launching airstrikes on the country overnight.

BBC Verify has geolocated video showing strikes in the Afghan provinces of Kandahar and Paktia.

Aerial footage released by the Pakistan government shows a large explosion at an ammunition depot near Ahmad Shah Baba International Airport, outside Kandahar city, in the south of the country. We confirmed the location by matching four of the depot’s buildings in the video with satellite imagery.

Image source, X/Telegram

Another video shared on social media shows smoke rising from a Taliban military base in the Urgun district of Paktia in eastern Afghanistan, which we also located by matching the roads and the distinctive building in the foreground with satellite imagery.

Pakistan forces also struck a military base outside the capital Kabul overnight.

Shruti Menon and Paul Brown
BBC Verify

We’ve been analysing videos and images on social media showing Pakistan’s strikes on Kabul and Kandahar in Afghanistan overnight.

But one video viewed over a million times on X and shared on other social media platforms that claims to show the wreckage of an F-16 fighter jet from Pakistan shot down and engulfed in flames has been AI generated.

A local media outlet in Afghanistan also reported the jet had been shot down but there is no verified evidence yet that a Pakistani jet was downed during the strikes.

Image source, X

We analysed the footage using multiple verification tools and consulted independent experts and determined the video is likely AI-manipulated.

Google’s Backstory tool, which looks for AI-generated content, found sufficient indicators that showed the footage is likely synthetic.

AI expert Henk Van Ess told BBC Verify the wreckage shown in the video appears much larger than an actual F-16. “The proportions do not match the compact, single-engine design of the fighter jet,” he said.

Shruti Menon and Paul Brown
BBC Verify

We're starting to get a sense of the extent of damage caused by Pakistan's overnight strikes on Afghanistan thanks to satellite imagery captured by Planet Labs this morning.

While the resolution of this imagery is relatively low, damage is clearly evident at two locations in Kabul, as well as sites in Kandahar and Gardiz.

The damage in Kabul corresponds to footage released by Pakistan's security forces which saw strikes taking place in two buildings around 400m apart in an eastern area of the city.

Elsewhere in the south-eastern city of Gardiz, we can see scorch marks and damage to four buildings at a military base. Data from Nasa also recorded a significant heat signature at this location overnight, suggesting a sizeable fire at the site.

In Kandahar, a historic Taliban stronghold, we've seen damage to two structures at a site around 4.5 km south-east of the city's airport.

We're working with experts to try to establish the function of the locations that have been struck.

Tom Edgington
BBC Verify

Following Labour’s loss in the Gorton and Denton by-election cabinet minister Heidi Alexander has been out defending the government’s record, including on cost-of-living pressures.

“In the last couple of weeks we saw news that inflation is coming down”, she told BBC Breakfast.

The Inflation rate measures the rise in the cost of goods and services. Official figures show it stood at 3% in the 12 months to January 2026.

That figure is lower than December, when annual inflation was running at 3.4%, external.

But despite this fall, inflation is still higher today compared to when Labour took power.

In June 2024 (Labour took office on 5 July), inflation was running at 2%, which is the target the government sets for the Bank of England in order to keep price rises low and stable.

Anthony Reuben
BBC Verify senior journalist

In the UK, we've been following the Green Party’s win in the Gorton and Denton by-election.

This morning party leader Zack Polanski was asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme about the viability of a wealth tax.

The party’s policy is to levy a 1% tax on people’s assets over £10m or more (after subtracting any debts they might have) and 2% on their assets over £1bn.

Polanski replied: “Let's take Switzerland for example, a place that has a wealth tax and is literally famous for having wealthy people in it.”

Image source, ADAM VAUGHAN/EPA/Shutterstock

Switzerland does have a wealth tax, not at a federal level but at the level of Cantons, the semi-autonomous administrative regions that make up the country.

Assets are taxed at between 0.13% and 0.86% according to PwC, external, depending on the level of wealth and where in the country you live.

All of those rates are below the Green Party’s lowest proposed rate, although the Swiss taxes sometimes apply to lower levels of wealth that the Greens are proposing.

What Polanski didn’t mention is that the overall tax burden in Switzerland is considerably lower than the UK.

Even after factoring in its wealth taxes, the overall tax burden in Switzerland came in at 28% of GDP, external in 2021, compared with around 34% in the UK - which is expected to rise to 38% in the coming years.

Other parts of the tax system in Switzerland are much more attractive for rich people, especially the low or non-existent rates of inheritance tax and capital gains tax.

Shruti Menon
BBC Verify

I’ve been analysing videos and images emerging on social media overnight claiming to show the aftermath of Pakistan’s strikes on Afghanistan.

This picture is spreading widely and claims to show a downed Pakistan Air Force jet.

We’ve checked the image using Google’s SynthID watermark detector, which found it was generated or edited with Google AI.

The fake image appears to be based on a widely available stock image of an F-16 jet from the Pakistan Air Force with a matching tail fin number that dates back to at least 2015.

Image source, X

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

We’re analysing footage emerging from Afghanistan this morning after Pakistan conducted strikes on two provinces and the capital, Kabul. It comes after the Afghan Taliban announced a major offensive against Pakistani military posts last night. As well as verifying real footage of the clashes, the team have debunked an AI-generated picture of a supposed strike and old footage of explosions and downed jets being presented as new. We’ll bring you more on that shortly.

And after the Green Party’s win in the Gorton and Denton by-election in the early hours of this morning, our fact-checking team are digging into leader Zack Polanski’s claims about wealth taxes in Switzerland and the UK having the worst rate of drug deaths in Europe.

We’re also monitoring the world’s largest warship, the USS Gerald R Ford, after it left Greece yesterday. It is expected to be travelling to Israel coast this morning as the US mounts more pressure on Iran.