iran's attack on israel last weekend heightened tensions at what was already a very volatile moment in the middle east, made even more volatile since by israel's response on friday. no surprise that the conflict dominated bbc news coverage on sunday. last night, for a few hours, israel lived in its skies. fighterjets battling waves of iranian drones and missiles fired at israeli targets. in iran, the launches were celebrated, one after the other, on national television. in the hours and days that followed, the attacks prompted plenty of commentary, analysis and interviews across bbc outlets. the latter included this question put on monday's today programme by presenter nick robinson to foreign secretary lord cameron. isn't the real risk of where

we are now that western governments appear to back israel the moment that israel is under attack, but when israel attacks and murders tens of thousands of innocent palestinians, we say the words, but we do almost nothing? i don't think that's right at all. the terminology used there prompted a significant backlash against nick robinson, including this message to newswatch from pauljaffey. nick robinson put out a statement that afternoon saying, meanwhile, rhoda yates sent us this plea about the bbc�*s coverage more widely. it's not easy right now to work out exactly what is happening

in the middle east, such is the fog of war and the amount of propaganda and inaccuracies being circulated. take this report by merlyn thomas from bbc verify. misinformation has been circulating. iran's state tv repeatedly aired a video of a fire in chile, claiming that it was footage of missiles successfully hitting targets in israel. we found the original version of the clip, which was posted to tik tok in february. and the israel defense forces posted this video compilation on ex of iran's retaliatory attacks. most of the clips are of the attack, but there's one old clip here right at the end of the video, and that's from nearly ten years ago of a russian grad rocket launcher. as well as those two examples, last weekend saw a plethora of other cases of disinformation being circulated. video of palestinians praying at the al—aqsa mosque last week was claimed as showing them celebrating saturday's iranian strikes, and footage from this video game, arma iii was posted as showing

israel's iron dome defence system in action against those strikes. meanwhile, video from iranian sources said to show missiles launching on saturday originated variously from the war in gaza in 2021, turkish rockets fired in syria in 2020, ukrainian missiles targeting russian ships last month, and an old farm fire in chile. more footage claiming to be of israelis panicking at the drone attacks actually showed fans of the pop star louis tomlinson in argentina last week. well, those videos with their sometimes wild claims are amongst the footage that's been examined over the past week by journalists at bbc verify. one of those journalists is shayan sardarizadeh and hejoins me now. thank you so much for taking the time to come on newswatch. can we talk about the footage of pop fans in buenos aires that we just showed a bit of ther? how fast did that get exposed, and what was the process?

yeah, absolutely. i mean, that video was mega viral in the early morning hours when the news of the iranian retaliatory strike against israel began breaking. and i saw it spreading on tik tok, on instagram, on the platform x. some really big influencer accounts on x and on instagram posted that video and it got millions and millions of views. and then our colleagues from the bbc monitoring service, which monitors iranian media 21w, they got in touch and they said, "have you guys seen this video? it's actually being run on iranian state tv and they're claiming this is israelis actually in fear and panicking from iranian missiles making the impact in israel". and in the video, it's a night—time video and you see a wide street with traffic lights on, some big buildings in the background. and you see a group of people, mostly young people, screaming and running. and then we actually found the original footage posted on tiktok by a young fan of louis tomlinson of one direction,

who had visited buenos aires near four seasons hotel, which is the building, the main building you see in the background. and they were running towards him and his car as he was arriving at the hotel. interesting. so another example which we saw merlyn thomas talking about — this fire in chile that the iranians also claim to be drone damage to israel. can you talk us through how you examined that one? absolutely. again, very similar to the previous video. so colleagues from bbc monitoring got in touch and said, "we have spotted this video that is being run on iranian state tv". and when you look at the video, it's actually quite, quite dramatic footage. you see what appears to be a motorway in the foreground and then in the background, there's a massive ball of fire that turns the night sky completely red. and the video that was run on iranian state tv didn't have sound on it. but when we found the video on social media spreading on social media, it was crystal clear that

you could hear people speak spanish. so there was a woman speaking spanish in it and another woman in the background was actually crying. we figured out that that video was actually posted in february on tiktok, and it actually shows a farm fire in chile and has got nothing to do with what was going on between iran and israel that night. now, there have also been attempts at deception from pro—israeli social media accounts. can you tell us about some of those examples that you found? yeah. so i found the official account of the israel defense forces, the idf, on the platform x on the night of the attack posting a video compilation. it was like a 30 second video compilation of some of the videos of the attack in different areas of israel that night. and it was basically a compilation video with the idea of warning the world about the threat of iran against israel. now, i was instantly surprised when at the end of that video i saw a clip which is quite notorious on the internet because it's been going around online for about ten years, and it's been used misleadingly

in all sorts of different contexts. but we know for a fact that that video, which shows basically a russian grad rocket launcher launching tonnes and tonnes of rockets into the night sky. it's been going around for many, many years in all sorts of misleading contexts. you know, this does make one wonder, how much is the scale and the size of misinformation in this conflict bigger and more sort of serious than what you've seen before? the way people consume news is changing, obviously. people don't necessarily sit in front of a television to follow the news. as soon as a news breaking news story breaks, people go on the internet, on social media platforms, on tik tok, snapchat, instagram, facebook, x, to try and find out what's happening and see the latest videos. and while many genuine videos of what's going on at that particular moment do get posted on the internet — and we and other news outlets use them and verify them in our reports — plenty of misleading videos are also posted.

anytime there's a massive breaking news situation, we've got to be prepared for a torrent of misleading footage being posted online. we have to be careful about what is actually accurate and true and what is not. shayan sardarizadeh, thank you so much for coming on. it's been hard to ignore the former prime minister liz truss this week. in case you haven't noticed, she's got a book out and has given several media interviews, including one with the bbc�*s political editor chris mason, played in full on newscast and in shorter versions elsewhere on bbc news. you talk in the book about the deep state. i mean, isn't that to indulge in conspiracy theory kind of quackery? ijust think british politics has to move on from the whole sort of personality politics of "who's the leader, what has x said, what has y said,

are they hypocrite"? to what the fundamental issues facing our country. and ijust feel there is not enough serious discussion about that. you're a massive taylor swift fan, aren't you? i think you've met her. is that right? i have met taylor swift. yeah. all the stuff about the lasting less time than a letter. this isjust pathetic, you know, point scoring. keith phair had this reaction to some of the lines of questioning there. linda harley had another concern, asking, "why

scott young also had his reservations. we put those points to bbc news and a spokesperson told us, thank you for all your comments this week. if you want to share your opinions about what you see or hear on bbc news, on tv, radio, online and social media — email newswatch at bbc.co.uk

or you can find us on x formerly known as twitter at newswatch bbc. you can call us on 0370106676. and do have a look at previous interviews on our website, bbc.co.uk slash newswatch. that's all from us for now. thank you forjoining us. do you think about getting in touch, and perhaps even coming on the programme? we'll be back to hear more of your thoughts about how the bbc covers the news next week. goodbye.

this is bbc news, we will have the headlines for you at the top of the hour, which is straight after this

programme. about 100,000 flights jet around the world every day. flying accounts for 2.5% of all carbon emissions. now, that might not sound like much, but if aviation was a country, it would be among the top ten most polluting nations in the world, and its impact is expected to rise. now there's a global race to get clean aviation off the ground. and some companies think they're close to cracking it. pretty soon, passengers will be flying in zero—emission aircraft. but how did we get here?

archive: the new machine is called, optimistically, the flyer. _ we've come a long way since the wright brothers�* first flight in 1903. that day, they lifted the world into a new dimension. then we achieved bigger, faster planes. great, but that's also how we ended up with all these emissions. jet engines burn kerosene, which releases carbon dioxide, one of the main greenhouse gases causing climate change. the industry faces an enormous challenge to clean up its act, and that means coming up with new fuels. let's take a look at some of the options. there are biofuels, which are made out of things like plants or vegetable oils, but they still produce some harmful emissions. then there's electric. but although batteries are getting far more efficient, the size that you'd need to power a passengerjet would be way too heavy. and there's one potential solution that's getting

people really excited — hydrogen. hydrogen fuel cells combine hydrogen and oxygen to create a flow of electrons around a circuit to power a motor. and as we all know, hydrogen plus oxygen equals h20. the problem is... we can't do much about the fundamental properties of hydrogen. volumetrically, we need to compress it to get sort of in the ballpark of not quite a third of the efficiency of fuels that we use. that means that we need often very large, very heavy tanks, because they need very thick walls to deal with the incredibly high pressures we need them at. what you end up with is an aeroplane that can't have any passengers in. this is the challenge faced by zeroavia, one of several companies working to make hydrogen—powered flight a reality. they retrofit existing planes with hydrogen engines. the company had several successful test flights with this plane last year.