Israel strikes Iran's Fordo nuclear site in fresh wave of attacks
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Don't miss the Thomas Rhett Veteran Boots Tour this summer. Fueled by Marathon. Now participate in locations. Terms and conditions apply. You're listening to the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. Hello, I'm Oliver Conway. We're recording this at 13 hours GMT on Monday the 23rd of June. Israel hits Iran with another wave of attacks striking Evin Prison and the Fordow nuclear site.

The Iranians have warned of a decisive response to the US bombing at the weekend. We'll hear what Russia, China and American voters make of it and get the assessment of the UN nuclear watchdog. Also in this podcast... Potentially, depending on where you're looking at, tens of thousands of galaxies will fit into that one little portion of the sky that is covered by your finger. The first images are released from the world's most powerful telescope.

Less than 36 hours after the US bombed Iran, Israel has launched a new attack on Fordow, the deepest of the Iranian nuclear sites.

President Trump insisted the American strikes had wiped out the Iranian nuclear programme, but no-one knows for sure how much damage has been done and what has happened to the 400kg of highly enriched uranium stored in Fordow. The BBC isn't allowed to report from inside Iran, but our World Affairs correspondent Joe Inwood has compiled this report. It is a shaky video, filmed on a phone in Isfahan in central Iran...

In the far distance, huge explosions can be seen, points of light in an otherwise black sky. It is one of the very few records of an event that has shaken the Middle East and may yet transform it. By the afternoon, the US attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities had brought crowds onto the streets of Tehran. They cheered the president, Massoud Pazeshkian, and chanted, death to Israel, death to America.

At this pro-government rally, the mood was one of defiance. Farzana is young, maybe in her early 30s, and wears a loosely fitting headscarf over a green dress. What America did is truly unforgivable, she says, and they should not think they can harm our country by doing this. Iran is stronger than they perceive.

Wearing a pink shirt and holding his young son in his arms, Dosikani uses a common insult for the United States. This is how the great Satan functions, he says. Deception. This is all deception. America and Israel do not understand anything other than the language of force.

But those who attend pro-government rallies and speak openly on camera are not representative of all Iranians, many of whom are concerned about the involvement of the world's most powerful military in their war with Israel. Since the outbreak of fighting, the BBC's Persian service has heard from people who want their voices heard but identities protected. My days and nights are the same. I feel paralysed.

I just stare at the ceiling all day and all night. I keep wondering what is happening next, and we are constantly caught by surprise.

No one listens to us. Iran is smart enough to know that any reaction to the US is suicide. My child will be born in a few days and I hope she'll be born in a new Iran with a new approach to national and international affairs. I'm very angry and upset. I don't think I've ever been this upset. The war is between three people, three leaders and their egos.

Now a report by Joe Inwood. The UN nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, has today held an emergency meeting in Vienna to discuss the US bombing. The agency's chief, Rafael Grossi, appealed for a ceasefire to allow Iran's nuclear sites to be inspected. And this was Iran's IAEA ambassador, Reza Najafi. These unlawful attacks may have far-reaching and devastating environmental consequences.

posing serious risks, radioactive, chemical and radiological contamination, not only for Iran but for the entire region. Furthermore, the physical security and containment of the nuclear materials, including enriched uranium, have been severely compromised.

As well as targeting Fordo, Israel also launched a heavy bombardment of the Iranian capital Tehran today, knocking out power and hitting the notorious Evin prison, home to many political detainees. I heard more about that from Kazran Adji of the BBC Persian service in Vienna, but first I asked him about the IAEA assessment of the damage done to Iran's nuclear programme.

The Board of Governors is still meeting and they're still debating. And the Director General gave a report to the Board of Governors here, giving some details. He says nobody knows how much damage has been inflicted

on Fordow, which is the main enrichment center in Iran, which produces highly enriched uranium, 60% enriched uranium there. He says, but the fact is that there are centrifuge machines there, assemblies of them, thousands of them, and they are very, very sensitive to any vibration.

And he says that given that, we can presume that the damage to the facility has been extensive. He also expressed a concern about this 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium that Iranians have moved to a secret place.

At the same time, Israel has hit Fordow again and Tehran, including the notorious Evin prison. What do you make of that? It's interesting. It reminded me of the Iranian revolution in 1979. Soon after the collapse of the Shah's regime, people rushed there and they broke the doors open and freed the political prisoners inside.

Now, in Iran, there's maybe some people who have loved ones inside Evin prison, which has a good number of political prisoners inside. Maybe they are thinking that...

their loved ones maybe a step closer to freedom. But nevertheless, from the pictures I've seen, the damage is to the actual entrance of the prison. And I'm not sure how extensive the damage is and what the consequences is. But as I said, many people with political prisoners inside are very concerned

and they are looking to see what happens next and whether their loved ones are safe in there. Now, Iran has been hitting back at Israel, but not yet a U.S. target. Does that surprise you? Yes and no. I mean, attacking targets, U.S. targets in the region, takes a little bit of time and needs a little bit of thought.

So they don't want to do something, I suppose, that is suicidal as far as Iran is concerned. So they have to choose their time and place carefully if they're going to do anything at all. Kazran Adji of the BBC Persian service at the IAEA in Vienna.

Well, after a relatively quiet night in Israel, some Iranian missiles got past the extensive air defence network today. An industrial area near a power station in Ashdod was struck and electricity supplies disrupted. Strikes were reported in Tel Aviv, Haifa in the north and another to the south of Tel Aviv. Rescue services said at least 23 people had been injured. Hugo Bochega gave us this update.

There were more air raid alerts this morning here in Israel as Iran launched a new wave of missiles. There have been no reports of casualties. But I think after those American airstrikes on three key nuclear facilities in Iran, the question here is about what's next.

There have been reports that some senior defence officials in Israel are saying that the goal here is to finish this campaign within days. Now, this would obviously give space for diplomacy, for negotiations, to try to reach some kind of deal with Iran, although it's very difficult to see how that's possible at the moment because, at least in public,

Iran has been repeating its position that it will not abandon the enrichment of uranium. They've been saying that this is their right. And this has been a key US demand, part of what President Trump says, you know, has described as unconditional surrender by Iran.

The Israeli authorities have been celebrating what they see as a successful operation so far. They have significantly damaged Iran's nuclear program and also Iran's missile capabilities. So for many here, it is now time to stop.

Hugo Bochega in Tel Aviv. In recent years, Iran has supplied Russia with weapons for its invasion of Ukraine. And today, the Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomed the Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi to Moscow, saying there was no justification for the attacks on Iranian territory. From Moscow, our Russia editor Steve Rosenberg reports. Russia and Iran are allies. The two countries have a strategic partnership agreement.

But what does that mean in practice? What assistance, if any, will Moscow offer Tehran? At the start of today's talks in the Kremlin, President Putin condemned what he described as absolutely unprovoked aggression against Iran. This meeting, he said, was an opportunity to think together about finding a way out of the situation. Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Arrachi, spoke of his country's close and friendly relations with Russia, which were now, he said, of a strategic nature.

But the Russian-Iranian partnership deal is not a military alliance and does not oblige the Kremlin to provide military assistance to Tehran.

Up till now, Moscow has been careful to maintain good relations with both Iran and Israel. Steve Rosenberg in Moscow. Many Americans remain wary of military action in the Middle East as a result of the US's long and bloody entanglement in Iraq. Some 4,500 American soldiers died in that conflict, which went on for nearly a decade after the then US President George W. Bush had declared victory in 2003. In

It's also why President Trump's claim to be a peacemaker went down so well with US voters. So what do they think of his attack on Iran? I voted for Trump. I totally agree with it because there is countries in this world that won't

use a nuclear weapon and there's countries that will. And Iran definitely would have used a nuclear weapon on somebody very close to them and then the whole world would have been done. That's my take on it. I'm a little hesitant to disturb the unrest that's already there in the Middle East and make it even worse. So, and you know,

It's what are we gaining out of it and what are the, I know we're trying to back Israel and support them, but I've always been opposed to attacks on other countries and regime change and those types of things. The deal with Iran and Israel is Iran and Israel and it's not necessarily America's problem.

place to step in? I would say that I would agree with his choice to protect the American people if a strike were to happen against the U.S., but I really don't see them being able to do anything against us, against America. Too much is just

not finding an end to the conflict and just drawing it out like past presidents have before. Well, in some of his latest posts on Truth Social, President Trump hinted at an objective beyond the destruction of Iran's nuclear capabilities, appearing to call for regime change, which the US has previously ruled out. So what's going on? Our North America editor, Sarah Smith, explains. Yeah, this is really confusing. He posted on social media that,

it's not politically correct to use the term regime change, but if the current Iranian regime is unable to make Iran great again, why wouldn't there be a regime change, he said. And he posted that at the end of a day when every other senior official from the administration had been out on television trying to reassure people that that was absolutely not what they were doing. The Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, said this mission was not and has not been about regime change.

You had the vice president, J.D. Vance, saying, we're not at war with Iran, we're at war with Iran's nuclear program. And then at the end of the day, this deeply confusing post comes from Donald Trump, where he suddenly is talking about regime change again, something he has argued vociferously against for years and years and years, ever since America got involved in the Iraq war back in 2003. Sarah Smith in Washington.

China has joined the calls for de-escalation in the Middle East. A spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry in Beijing said a spillover of the conflict had to be avoided and a political resolution found. Yesterday, the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called on China to use its influence to persuade Iran not to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial trade route for oil and gas. I heard more from our correspondent in Beijing, Stephen McDonnell.

One of the big ticket influence aspects would be the amount of oil that China buys from Iran, which is huge, like it's Iran's biggest customer, also important for China. It's like not, I think, roughly 20% of China's needs or something along those lines, 20 or 30% come from Iran. So again, it's not nothing. That's the big driver, if you like. And I'm sure there are also the geostrategic considerations in that

China is using the likes of Russia and Iran to play off against the West, and so it likes to keep Iran close for those reasons. Well, and that's why it is that the Trump administration have called on Beijing to try and lean on Iran to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, because it will affect, of

Of course, the supply of oil to much of the world if that crucial shipping lane was shut down. Now, China, they would say, well, OK, if we're going to lean on them to do that, how about you lean on Israel to get them to stop attacking Iran? Because China's UN ambassador, Fu Zong, called for a strait

in terms of the impulse towards force, as he described it, to avoid exacerbating conflicts. He said that everybody needs to basically immediately cease fire, but that this especially applies for Israel. And China, along with Pakistan and Russia, put that resolution to the Security Council calling for an immediate ceasefire.

But now, of course, that'll be vetoed by the U.S., which is one of the five countries which can veto anything in the Security Council, partly because the resolution criticizes the attacks on Iran in the first place. Now, many analysts are saying this U.S. attack on Iran undermines international law.

Will it have any impact on China's attitude towards Taiwan? What you mean in terms of emboldening it to sort of do this sort of thing? I mean, every time one of these countries...

...invades another, whether it be Russia's invasion of Ukraine... ...or the US just out of the blue attacking Iran for the first time... ...of course other countries around the world are going to think... ...well, maybe we can get away with that. Because if you're going to toss out the rules-based order... ...and it becomes might equals right...

Well, yeah, you'd have to think that Beijing would be putting that into its calculations in terms of if the day was to come where we were going to try and seize Taiwan by force, how much blowback might we expect? Stephen McDonnell in Beijing.

When the first Israeli air raids hit the Iranian capital Tehran 10 days ago, many packed their bags and drove away, heading to the Caspian Sea or the mountains. But some are trying to cross the border into Turkey. Our senior international correspondent Ola Gerin is there. Turkey's border with Iran, flanked by mountains, and now a gateway to and from a country under attack.

At the Kapikoi crossing, we found movement in both directions, some fleeing the bombing by Israel and America, others rushing back home to be with loved ones. Amir, a retired British Iranian, had just fled Tehran. And what was your feeling when you got across the border here? Feeling relieved, really, to be honest with you. I feel relieved, yes.

How dangerous was the situation in Tehran? It is very dangerous. It is bad. The sky belongs to the Israelis. So they can do what they like. They're just coming in, they just bomb and go. And nothing there to stop them because they've got the sky and that's it. Very scary for you. Very, very scary for everyone.

This is what he left behind, a country under fire, a regime that is holding on and a war that may now escalate. But some, like 13-year-old Dariush, are hoping that a new Iran may emerge from the ashes. He crossed the border with his younger brother and his mother. He told me he'll go home if change comes.

God willing, Iran will be free. Soon all of us will live in freedom, he says, and the Islamic Republic will be gone. But among those going back into Iran today, there was more caution. We found no one willing to speak on camera. One man told us, we're too afraid. Ola Geren on the Turkey-Iran border.

Now we need your help with a special episode about the Iran crisis. We'll be putting your questions to a range of BBC correspondents. They can be as simple or as complex as you like. Please send us an email or voice note to globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk.

And still to come on this edition of the Global News Podcast. It's certainly showing them the satisfaction, I think, of what things growing. The fact that the plants grow offline, I think replicates how plants do it in the real world. The popular new video game about gardening. You ever feel that deep pull to the land to know it, to build something that lasts that itch for your own wild country? Well, it ain't just a daydream. In 2025, it

It matters more than ever. Whether you're a lifelong hunter or just starting out, dreaming of land to explore, to leave something real, or there is a trailhead where you can start. It's called land.com, the biggest online network for rural property. Find the right agent and explore everything from timber tracks to ranches. Get the tools you need to buy that dream generational property.

Stop dreaming about it and head to land.com. It's your place to find your open space. The ocean delights us as playful otters restore coastal kelp forests. The ocean teaches us how our choices impact even the deepest places. The ocean connects us. Visit montereybayaquarium.org slash connects.

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Even as President Putin condemned what he called the unprovoked and unjustified aggression against Iran, the Russian military has again attacked Ukraine. At least eight people were killed and dozens injured in an air raid on the capital Kiev. The Ukrainian military said Russia had launched more than 350 drones and 16 missiles overnight at Ukrainian territory. Our correspondent in Kiev, Joel Gunter, gave us this update.

This was another combined missile and drone strike on the capital following a very large similar strike last week. We know that rescuers are still searching the rubble, meaning that the death toll could potentially rise. This was a wave of drones that hit the city as well as missiles and a strike that once again overwhelmed the city's air defences. Now, President Trump, of course, had been involved in trying to broker flights

A ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia. He's obviously more distracted now. What are the prospects for any deal there? Well, they are beginning to look dim. This was, as I mentioned, the second massive strike on Kiev within a week. Ukrainian officials have vowed to retaliate against Russia with increased strikes.

The previous round of talks between Russia and Ukraine finished some three weeks ago with virtually nothing agreed apart from a limited exchange of prisoners and exchange of the dead.

support for ongoing military aid to Ukraine uncertain. The prospects of a peace deal, as you say, are seeming dim. President Zelensky will be in London today to visit the Prime Minister and will be hoping to shore up ongoing support from the UK.

Millions of students in northern China are taking high school entrance exams during a heat wave, prompting the authorities in Beijing to send specially equipped ambulances to testing sites. More details from our Asia-Pacific editor, Celia Hatton.

Students in China usually write the high school entrance exam, the Zhongkao, when they're 15. It's a grueling test that spans several days. And this year, it's happening in a heat wave. Temperatures reached 38 Celsius in Beijing on Monday and are expected to climb.

Ambulances outside the testing sites are carrying saline drips and rehydration drinks. There's a growing belief that Zhongkou exams to enter the right high school play a bigger role in determining a child's future than college entrance tests. Celia Hatton.

The first photos have been released from the world's largest digital camera. The telescope at the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile will catalogue billions of new objects in space and map the night sky for 10 years. The aim is to answer the mysteries of the universe, including how it began and what dark matter really is. The BBC was granted access to the telescope just before it went operational. From Chile, here's Ione Wells.

From the outside, this telescope is a huge chunk of metal amid a desert landscape. It's on top of the mountain Cerro Patron in the Chilean desert. This is an ideal place for watching the stars because it's dry, it's high, and it gets very, very dark.

My name is Leanne Guy. I'm the Associate Director for System Performance at Rubin Observatory, and I've been working on the project for seven years. Vera Rubin was a pioneering astronomer in the 20th century. Thanks to working mum, Vera Rubin.

I picked the outsides of galaxies because that was the problem. She did a lot of work trying to study the nature of dark matter. The amount of data that Rubin Observatory will collect will be able to answer a lot of questions, hopefully about what is the nature of dark matter.

So the design of Rubin Observatory and the Legacy Survey of Space and Time has been driven by four science goals. Probing the nature of dark energy and dark matter, exploring the transient optical sky, taking an inventory of the solar system and mapping the Milky Way. And so what that really means is that we've built a telescope that is a discovery machine. It will also be able to bring to light questions that we haven't even thought about yet. It will open up the unknown.

The sheer scale of the camera on this telescope is so impressive. It's the biggest digital camera in the world. It's taller than me, about 1.65 metres tall. It weighs 2,800 kilos. It's got a 3,200 megapixel camera. That's 67 times more powerful than the iPhone 16 Pro. It's so high definition, it could see a golf ball on the moon.

This camera has a field of view that is... Sean McBride is one of the camera scientists here. If you took your finger and held it at arm's reach and put it up to the sky, and you took an image with Ellis' T-cam and took all the stars and galaxies that could fit inside your finger...

By the end of the survey, it'll be thousands, potentially depending on where you're looking at, tens of thousands of galaxies will fit into that one little portion of the sky that is covered by your finger. And now imagine that over the entire southern sky, we're getting an unprecedented data set. Okay, now we're going to cure this spiral galaxy.

As well as trying to visualize the night sky, the Vera Rubin Observatory is hoping to make it audible too. Stephanie Depper is an astronomy content strategist and the co-lead on sonification here, the process of creating sound from these images of the stars and galaxies. What we're trying to do with sonification is instead of represent an astronomical image visually with pixels on a screen, we're trying to represent it musically, audially with

with notes for your ears. What I'm gonna play right now is a prototype

And that report from Chile by Ione Wells. Finally, to a new Roblox game in which players tend their own virtual gardens, planting seeds and harvesting and selling their crops. Grow a Garden is one of the biggest games in the world right now, and last week beat Fortnite's record for the largest number of active players at any one time, 16.4 million. Here's one gaming YouTuber's experience. Planting my blueberries, some orange tulips...

So, is this a new generation getting into gardening or another example of the online world taking over?

Anna Foster spoke to Chris Dring, editor of The Games Business, and to Alice Vincent, gardener and author of Rootbound, which explores how young people are discovering the power of plants. It's certainly showing them the satisfaction, I think, of growing up

things growing. The fact that the plants grow offline, I think replicates how plants do it in the real world. The fact that gardening is a slower process, that it does take us away from digital lives, but that obviously this is happening on screen and not IRL. Yeah. Chris, what I find sort of particularly interesting is that so many games that do so well are

are all about kind of guns and bombs and shoot them up or driving somewhere very fast. And this one seems so different to that. I was absolutely stunned when my 13-year-old told me that him and his friends were obsessed with it. What is it that you think is sucking people in? Well, actually, this genre of game, we call them cosy games, are immensely popular at the moment. There's games like Animal Crossing, which is a sort of you build a house and you make friends and the neighbours and you clear your mortgage.

I think because of the chaos in the world at the moment, a game which is quite relaxing, emotionally comforting in some ways, is drawing quite a lot of people in. And it is quite, it is satisfying. It is a sort of beautiful little thing to play. And as I say, these games are actually really popular. We're associated with, you know, shooter games and action games. There's all sorts of games that do really, really well. And this one's bigger than we've ever seen before, but it's not unheard of. But also, you know, as you were saying, Alice, the idea of...

planting things and making them grow and tending them. I suppose that the real world is a little harsher in that way, because on your garden, if you lose it, you just start again. Whereas it's a little bit harder to sort of start again in real life. Not impossible, but just not quite as simple.

It's not quite simple, no, but that is part of the lessons, I think, and one of the kind of deep satisfactions that literally grows with gardening. I think, you know, as someone who is a self-trained gardener who came to it, you know, in my mid-20s, which was surprising to think a lot of my friends at the time, you

You want initially instant gratification. And then the more you do it, the more you realize that actually it's about tracking the seasons. It's about those seasons of rest and seasons of growth that teaches you a lot about other things in life. And I think that's something that has always been important to generations who have engaged with nature in a way that might be seen as unconventional. We're talking about teenagers getting into gardening here, but

you know, in the Victorian era, teenage girls were obsessed with firms. You know, we've always had generations who have had unlikely fascinations with it, whether that's tulip mania in the 17th century or now. Alice Vincent and Chris Dring talking to Anna Foster.

And that is all from us for now, but the Global News Podcast will be back very soon. This edition was mixed by Tom Bartlett. The producers were Paul Day and Stephanie Tillotson. Our editors, Karen Martin. I'm Oliver Conway. Until next time, goodbye.