The BBC has obtained footage and interviews from the Iranian capital Tehran which evoke a city of strained nerves, of constant waiting for the next air strike and relentless fear of the state security apparatus. The identities of the people in this report have been protected. While independent journalists still try to gather testimony that offers a credible alternative view, they run the risk of arrest, torture and possibly worse. Displaced Palestinians were told to secure their tents to prevent them being blown away as a storm swept through the enclave. Video filmed by a witness and verified by the BBC shows a drone crashing close to the airport.

Graves being prepared for the victims of an airstrike on a school in Minab in southern Iran, 2 March 2026. Graves being prepared for the victims of an airstrike on a school in Minab in southern Iran, 2 March 2026. A photo of Iran's bombed schoolgirl graveyard went around the world. T he graves, freshly dug, lie in neat rows of 20 across. More than 60 have already been carved out of the earth, with a few clusters of people standing gathered around them.

Could Iran be using China's BeiDou system? Iran war: What is happening on day 17 of US-Israel attacks? Israel launched a new wave of attacks on Tehran as the US-Israel war on Iran entered its 17th day on Monday. Escalations continue in the Gulf region, where authorities suspended flights at Dubai international airport after a drone incident sparked a fire nearby. Dubai-based Emirates announced later that it was resuming limited flights, with several planned routes cancelled for the day.

Could Iran be using China's BeiDou system? The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has announced diversion of some flights from the Dubai international airport, one of the world's busiest, after a drone attack sparked a fire near the facility, as Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia also reported intercepting drones and missiles. The Dubai Media Office on Monday said civil defence teams had "successfully contained the fire resulting from impact to one of the fuel tanks in the vicinity" of the airport, noting that no injuries had been reported so far. The Dubai Civil Aviation Authority, meanwhile, said it was temporarily suspending flights at the airport "as a precautionary measure to ensure the safety of all passengers and staff". It did not say when they expected flights to resume.

Because of shifting storms and sweltering summers, Iran's capital faces a future "Day Zero" when the taps run dry. During the summer of 2025, Iran experienced an exceptional heat wave, with daytime temperatures across several regions, including Tehran, approaching 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) and forcing the temporary closure of public offices and banks. During this period, major reservoirs supplying the Tehran region reached record-low levels, and water supply systems came under acute strain . By early November, the reservoir behind Amir Kabir Dam, a main source of drinking water for Tehran, had dropped to about 8 percent of its capacity . The present crisis reflects not only this summer's extreme heat but also several consecutive years of reduced precipitation and ongoing drought conditions across Iran.

This study presents a learning - based nonlinear algorithm for tracking control of differential - drive mobile robots. The Computed Torque Method (CTM) suffers from inaccurate knowledge of system parameters, while Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms a re known for sample inefficiency and weak stability guarantees. The proposed method replaces the black box policy network of a DRL agent with a gray box Computed Torque Controller (CTC) to improve sample efficiency and ensure closed loop stability. This ap proach enables finding an optimal set of controller parameters for an arbitrary reward function using only a few short learning episodes. The Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3) algorithm is used for this purpose. Additionally, some controller parameters are constrained to lie within known value ranges, ensuring the RL agent learns physically plausible values. A technique is also ap plied to enforce a critically damped closed loop time response. The controller's performance is evaluated on a differential drive mobile robot simulated in the MuJoCo physics engine and compared against the raw CTC and a conventional kinematic controller.

For the past few years, governments across the world have paid close attention to conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. There, it is said, we see the first glimpses of what warfare of the future will look like, not just in terms of weaponry, but also in terms of new technologies and tactics. Most recently, the United States-Israeli attacks on Iran demonstrated not just new strategies of drone deployment and infiltration but also new vulnerabilities. During the 12-day conflict, Iran and vessels in the waters of the Gulf experienced repeated disruptions of GPS signal. This clearly worried the Iranian authorities who, after the end of the war, began to look for alternatives.

Gilan, Iran – The Israeli military used hundreds of fighter jets, armed drones and refuelling planes to attack Iran during its 12-day war backed by the United States, but it was also heavily assisted by operations launched from deep within Iranian soil. Just hours after the Israeli army and Mossad spy agency started their attacks before dawn on June 13, they released footage that appeared to have been recorded at night from undisclosed locations inside Iran. One grainy video showed Mossad operatives, camouflaged and wearing tactical gear including night-vision goggles, crouched in what looked like desert terrain, deploying weapons that aimed to destroy Iran's air defence systems to help pave the way for incoming attack aircraft. Others showed projectiles, with mounted cameras, descending to slam into Iranian missile defence batteries, as well as ballistic missile platforms. The projectiles appeared to be Spike missiles – relatively small, precision-guided anti-armour missiles that can be programmed to fly to targets that are out of their line of sight.

Kyiv, Ukraine – There is a Persian word millions of Ukrainians fear. Shahed – also spelled as Shaheed or Shahid, originally a Quranic term for "martyr" or "witness" – is the name given to the triangular, explosives-laden, Iranian-designed drones that became a harrowing part of daily life and death in wartime Ukraine. These days, they are assembled in the Volga-region Russian city of Yelabuga and undergo constant modifications to make them faster, smarter and deadlier during each air raid that involves hundreds of drones. Their latest Russian versions shot down in Ukraine earlier this month have artificial intelligence modules to better recognise targets, video cameras and two-way radio communication with human operators. "The word'Shahed' will forever be cursed in Ukrainian next to'Moscow' and'Putin'," said Denys Kovalenko, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Kovalenko's face and arms were cut by glass shards after a Shahed exploded above his northern Kyiv neighbourhood in 2023.

The IDF said it had killed Izadi in a strike on an apartment in Qom, south of Tehran, in the early hours of Saturday. He had been in charge of the Palestine Corps of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps's (IRGC) Quds Force, responsible for handling ties with the Palestinian armed groups. He was reportedly instrumental in arming and financing Hamas, and had been responsible for military co-ordination between senior IRGC commanders and Hamas leaders, the IDF said. In April 2024, Izadi narrowly survived an Israeli air strike targeting the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria - an attack that killed several high-ranking Quds Force commanders. Israel later on Saturday also claimed to have killed another Quds Force commander, Behnam Shahriyari in a drone strike as he was travelling in a car through western Iran.