Britain moving jets to Middle East to support regional security, PM Starmer says
LONDON, June 14 (Reuters) - Britain is moving additional military assets, including fighter jets, to the Middle East to provide support across the region, Prime Minister Keir Starmer told reporters on Saturday as he was en route to a Group of Seven meeting in Canada.
Iran and Israel traded missiles and airstrikes on Saturday, the day after Israel launched an air offensive against its old enemy, killing commanders and scientists and bombing nuclear sites in a stated bid to stop it building an atomic weapon.
"We are moving assets to the region, including jets, and that is for contingency support in the region," Starmer said.
Britain already has fighter jets in the Middle East as part of an operation to counter threats in Iraq and Syria.
Crews began deployment preparations on Friday morning, when it was clear the situation in the region was deteriorating, a spokesperson for the prime minister said.
Further refuelling aircraft from British bases have been deployed, and additional fighter jets will be sent, the spokesperson added.
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The Sun
25 minutes ago
- The Sun
Exact dates NatWest will close 55 bank branches in fresh blow to high street
NATWEST is shutting the doors on 55 bank branches for good, in yet another hit to Britain's already struggling high streets. Despite the closures, the bank says it will invest over £20 million in its remaining network to modernise services and reduce environmental impact. Closures will begin from 24 September 2025 and continue through to 5 February 2026, marking another major pullback from bricks-and-mortar banking. It comes just months after NatWest revealed plans to shut 53 other branches in 2025 — as it continues to scale back face-to-face services. A spokesperson for NatWest said: "Over 80% of our active current account holders now use our digital services and over 97% of retail accounts with us are now opened online. "Our customers appreciate the speed and convenience of digital banking for everyday transactions, and often, when it comes to making bigger, more complex decisions they value speaking to our skilled and experienced colleagues." They added: "We expect to invest over £20m in our network across the UK in 2025 to improve customer service, enhance the look and feel of our branches, and reduce the environmental impact of our buildings, as well as continuing to invest in shared solutions like the Post Office and Banking Hubs. "We will also provide temporary support for transitions to our new network in selected locations through our 12-week Community Pop-Ups." The bank has confirmed it will close 52 permanent branches and axe three mobile banking vans in locations across the UK, including Torquay, Birmingham, Abingdon, Leamington Spa, Stratford-upon-Avon and Northampton. NatWest has already drastically reduced its branch numbers in recent years. Since 2015, the NatWest Group — which also includes Royal Bank of Scotland and Ulster Bank — has shut 1,409 branches. In 2023, the bank closed nearly 20 locations, followed by 48 more closures last year. The latest move comes amid a wider trend across the industry, with major high street banks shutting hundreds of branches between them. According to Which?, around 6,100 bank and building society branches have closed across the UK since January 2015. That's 61 per cent of all branches shut in just 10 years. Banks have blamed the closures on declining footfall and a steady shift towards online and mobile banking. But the move has sparked concern from community groups and campaigners, particularly for older people and those less comfortable with digital technology. Research shows 39 per cent of people aged over 65 do not use online banking, putting them at high risk of financial exclusion. And a Which? survey last year found that more than half of disabled or impaired customers were negatively impacted by bank closures, making everyday banking much harder. Full list of NatWest banks closing 1. Abingdon, 11 Market Place, Abingdon, OX14 3HH, 24/9/2025 2. Birmingham - Acocks Green, Shop 3, 1160 Warwick Road, Birmingham, B27 6DF, 16/9/2025 3. Ashby-de-la-Zouch, 54 Market Street, Ashby-De-La-Zouch, LE65 1BB, 18/9/2025 4. Bicester, 1-7 Manorsfield Road, Bicester, OX26 6DA, 30/9/2025 5. Bridgwater, 9 York Buildings, Bridgwater, TA6 3BS, 27/10/2025 6. Bridport, 22 East Street, Bridport, DT6 3LG, 29/10/2025 7. Cardiff - Canton, 277 Cowbridge Road East, Cardiff, CF5 1WX, 16/9/2025 8. Chippenham, 30 High Street, Chippenham, SN15 3HB, 15/10/2025 9. Cirencester, 32 Market Place, Cirencester, GL7 2NU, 17/9/2025 10. Crome r, 61 Church Street, Cromer, NR27 9YY, Date to be confirmed 11. Cwmbran, 36-37 Gwent Square, Cwmbran, NP44 1YW, 1/9/2025 12. Dorchester, 49 South Street, Dorchester, DT1 1DW, 22/10/2025 13. Birmingham - Edgbaston, 30A Harborne Road, Birmingham, B15 3AA, 11/9/2025 14. Ely, 16 Market Street, Ely, CB7 4YY, 10/9/2025 15. Evesham, 2 Bridge Street, Evesham, WR11 4RS, Date to be confirmed 16. Bristol - Fishponds, 778 Fishponds Road, Bristol, BS16 3TX, 4/9/2025 17. Halesowen, 2 Hagley Road, Halesowen, B63 4RQ, 3/9/2025 18. Hinckley, 13 The Borough, Hinckley, LE10 1NL, 17/9/2025 19. Honiton, 94 High Street, Honiton, EX14 1JL, 21/10/2025 20. Kettering, 16 High Street, Kettering, NN16 8SZ, 28/10/2025 21. Launceston, 14 Westgate Street, Launceston, PL15 7AG, Date to be confirmed 22. Luton - Leagrave, 11 Marsh Road, Luton, LU3 2QP, 15/9/2025 23. Leicester - Melton Road, 2 Melton Road, Leicester, LE4 5EA, 2/9/2025 24. Leighton Buzzard, 27 High Street, Leighton Buzzard, LU7 1DX, 28/10/2025 25. Llangefni, Glanhwfa Road, Llangefni, LL77 7WY, 4/9/2025 26. Cardiff - Llanishen, Westminster Chambers, 50-52 Station Road, Cardiff, CF14 5QP, 11/9/2025 27. Lowestoft, 53 London Road North, Lowestoft, NR32 1BJ, 15/10/2025 28. Melton Mowbray, 7 High Street, Melton Mowbray, LE13 0TT, 29/9/2025 29. Midsomer Norton, 3 High Street, Radstock, BA3 2LE, 8/10/2025 30. Mol d, 48-50 High Street, Mold, CH7 1BA, 21/10/2025 31. Neath, 35 Green Street, Neath, SA11 1DB, 13/10/2025 32. Newmarket (Suffolk), 18 High Street, Newmarket, CB8 8LH, 24/9/2025 33. Northampton - Weston Favell Shopping Centre, 17 Weston Favell Centre, Northampton, NN3 8FZ, 15/9/2025 34. Leicester - Oadby, 5 The Parade, Leicester, LE2 5BB, 10/9/2025 35. Paignton, 15 Victoria Street, Paignton, TQ4 5DE, 2/10/2025 36. Portishead, 25 High Street, Bristol, BS20 6BL, Date to be confirmed 37. Rayleigh, 43 High Street, Rayleigh, SS6 7EW, 2/9/2025 38. Redditch, Church Green House, Church Green East, Redditch, B98 8DG, 14/10/2025 39. Ringwood, 11 High Street, Ringwood, BH24 1BA, 1/10/2025 40. Romsey, 27 Market Place, Romsey, SO51 8ZH, 13/10/2025 41. Leamington Spa, Royal Priors, 59 Parade, Leamington Spa, CV32 4ZX, 1/10/2025 42. Birmingham - Shirle y, 231 Stratford Road, Solihull, B90 3AJ, 29/9/2025 43. Birmingham - Smethwick, 34-38 High Street, Smethwick, B66 1DU, 25/9/2025 44. Stevenage, 26-28 Queensway, Stevenage, SG1 1BS, 7/10/2025 45. Stratford-upon-Avon, 31 Rother Street, Stratford-Upon-Avon, CV37 6ZS, 8/10/2025 46. Sudbury, 32 Market Hill, Sudbury, CO10 2EN, 30/9/2025 47. Torquay, 108 Union Street, Torquay, TQ2 5PH, 3/9/2025 48. Trowbridge, 62 Fore Street, Trowbridge, BA14 8EX, 16/10/2025 49. Wellingborough, 40 Market Street, Wellingborough, NN8 1AD, 7/10/2025 50. Wickford, 63 High Street, Wickford, SS12 9AH, 18/9/2025 51. Wisbech, 1 Market Place, Wisbech, PE13 1DT, 1/9/2025 52. Yate, 3-5 North Walk, Bristol, BS37 4AG, 25/9/2025 53. (MOBILE) Prestatyn, Lower High Street Car Park, Prestatyn, LL19 9LG, 29/9/2025 54. (MOBILE) Abergele, Tesco Car Park, Abergele, LL22 7AA, 29/9/2025 55. (MOBILE) Welshpool, Tesco Welshpool Car Park, Welshpool, SY21 7BL, 29/9/2025 The three mobile branches being scrapped also affect rural and hard-to-reach communities who rely on them to manage their money without travelling long distances. While some services will be available via the Post Office or new shared banking hubs, critics say this doesn't go far enough to meet local needs. Customers are urged to check if their local branch is on the chopping block and prepare for alternative ways to bank. Other major banks are also swinging the axe, cutting thousands of branches up and down the country. Lloyds Banking Group, which includes Lloyds Bank, Halifax and Bank of Scotland, has announced over 170 closures for 2024 and 2025 combined. Barclays has already closed more than 1,200 branches since 2015 and confirmed over 100 more will shut by the end of this year. HSBC is also slashing locations, with 114 branches closed in 2023 alone — and more due to follow in 2025. TSB and Santander have also trimmed their networks in recent years, with TSB shutting over 250 sites since 2020, while Santander closed 111 branches in 2021. Customers being forgotten Customers are being forgotten, writes The Sun's Head of Consumer, Tara Evans. Customers are being forgotten, writes The Sun's Head of Consumer, Tara Evans. With branches closing and online banking taking over, customers can be left feeling cut off. We wrote about forgotten customers back in July on our Sun Money pages in our weekly newspaper section. People like David Elkins, 82, a retired service engineer from Calne, Wilts, who saw his HSBC branch close in 2023 and had to travel ten miles to the next nearest. He has a kidney issue and needs frequent dialysis, making it impractical. Banking hubs are emerging as a solution to address the gaps left by widespread closures - but there are not enough of them. There are plans for 146 of these, but so far there are only 60. You can use one of the Post Office's 11,635 branches to perform basic banking tasks, but they don't allow you to open or close accounts for example. 2
Telegraph
34 minutes ago
- Telegraph
The mountain fortress Israel must destroy to topple Iran's nuclear programme
The events of the past few days appear to have proved that Israel has near-total air superiority over Iran. Iranian armed forces have been powerless to counter the Israeli airstrikes that have destroyed critical buildings and wiped out swathes of the Islamic Republic's military leadership. At least 14 Iranian nuclear scientists have also been killed by the unilateral operation, codenamed Rising Lion, which appears aimed at decapitating the country's nuclear programme. One key site remains unscathed, however: the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant. Located 20 miles from the ancient, central city of Qom, and about 100 miles south of Tehran, Fordow is one of two nuclear enrichment sites in the country. The other, in Natanz, was reportedly partially destroyed in the attacks. Hidden in the mountains, its key buildings buried deep underground, Fordow is an altogether more challenging target. Ringed by anti-air defences, it has become a symbol of Iranian defiance as well as its technological ingenuity. If Israel is truly to dismantle Iran's nuclear capabilities, it must disable Fordow. That's because here, uranium is enriched in centrifuges at up to 60 per cent, a shade under the purity needed to build a nuclear weapon. 'The entire operation… really has to be completed with the elimination of Fordow,' the Israeli ambassador to the US, Yechiel Leiter, told reporters on Friday. A day later, Iranian sources reported that Fordow had been attacked, but with limited damage. 'The be-all and end-all of Iran's nuclear operation' Analysts have described the mountainous fortress, which sits within an Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps base, as 'the be-all and end-all of Iran's nuclear operation'. 'If you don't get Fordow,' said Brett McGurk, who has worked as Middle East coordinator for several American presidents, 'you haven't eliminated their ability to produce weapons-grade material.' The problem for Israel is that it seems to lack the weapons to do the job. It is thought that Fordow's heavily fortified facilities could only be destroyed with so-called 'bunker busters', enormous bombs designed especially to penetrate buildings below ground. Israel is not believed to have such munitions, nor the heavy bombers needed to deliver them. The US, its key ally, has both positioned within striking distance of Iran. But Washington has been clear about its intent not to get directly involved in the current conflict. The result is what Peter Wildeford, a respected commentator and forecaster, calls 'The Fordow Paradox'. In an article on Saturday he wrote: 'The US possesses the military capability to destroy Fordow but lacks the political will, while Israel has the will but not the capability.' 'This fundamental misalignment between America's power and Israel's urgency explains why we're watching not just another round of strikes, but potentially the first act in nuclear proliferation's next wave.' Israel will keep looking for ways to destroy Fordow, in other words, while Iran will keep enriching uranium. 'Inconsistent with a peaceful nuclear programme' The Islamic Republic, which has long denied seeking to develop nuclear weapons, began enriching uranium at Fordow in September 2011. The site's existence had been revealed two years earlier, when declassified British, French and US intelligence reports detailed a secret facility 'inconsistent with a peaceful [nuclear] programme.' The news was so shocking that it provoked censure from China and Russia, which usually support Iran, and meant Fordow became a central point of focus in attempts to curtail the country's nuclear programme. At first, Iranian officials said the Islamic Republic would enrich uranium to 20 per cent purity for medical purposes. (The silvery-grey, radioactive metal is a critical component in the making of isotopes used in imaging and radiotherapy.) Under the terms of the landmark JCPOA nuclear deal brokered by Barack Obama in 2015, Fordow was to stop enriching uranium for 15 years and Tehran agreed to keep its level of uranium enrichment more widely at 3.67 per cent – a level considered suitable for civilian nuclear power and research purposes, but not nuclear weapons – in return for sanctions relief. By 2018, however, and the US's withdrawal from the JCPOA at Donald Trump's direction, the facility was reported to be producing enriched uranium once again. In March 2023, the UN's atomic watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), confirmed reports that 83.7 per cent, near weapons-grade U-235, had been found at Fordow. Last week, in its latest quarterly report, the IAEA said that Iran had produced enough 60 per cent purity uranium – capable of being further enriched in a matter of days to 90 per cent weapons grade material – to potentially manufacture nine nuclear bombs. It was a 'matter of serious concern', it concluded. The rise of the bunker buster Evidently, Israeli leaders agreed. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Operation Rising Lion is aimed at rolling back 'the Iranian threat to Israel's very survival', adding the operation will 'continue for as many days as it takes to remove the spread'. Meanwhile, satellite images have shown extensive damage to the nuclear facilities at Natanz and another site, Isfahan. The IAEA confirmed that critical buildings at the latter facility had been damaged. Experts believe Israel could have used bunker-busting munitions in these attacks, albeit smaller ones than those which would be needed for a meaningful strike on Fordow. Justin Bronk, of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), told the BBC that the pattern of explosions 'would fit with penetrating bombs being used', such as 'GBU-31(V)3s or even possibly more specialised penetrating GBU-28s'. Modern bunker busters were developed after the first Gulf War in 1990, when coalition forces came across Iraqi fortifications too strong and deeply buried for conventional munitions to damage them. The new weapons had a heavily hardened nose, initially made from an artillery barrel, and a delayed fuse, meaning they would not explode until after they had penetrated their target, rather than on initial impact. While the bombs the Israelis already possess are effective through up to six metres of reinforced concrete, the American GBU-57A/B is thought to be the only munition that could deal a serious blow to Fordow. Also known as MOP, or Massive Ordnance Penetrator, the GBU-57 is more than six metres long and weighs 14,000kg, with a 2,400kg warhead and a GPS guidance system. It can reportedly penetrate through up to 61 metres of concrete. The only plane capable of delivering it is the B-2 stealth bomber, which can carry two at a time. Another plant even more deeply fortified is under construction Still, Israel has other methods at its disposal. Some have suggested that conventional munitions, if repeatedly dropped on the same target, might be able to damage Fordow. Or it could use special forces on the ground to try to destroy the facility from inside. In April 2021, Israeli reports claimed Mossad was involved in an explosion that caused a blackout at the Natanz facility. In 2010, the Stuxnet cyber virus damaged several nuclear centrifuges. Such operations are risky, however, especially now that Iran will be on its highest alert. And even were they to successfully target Fordow, it would not represent the end of Iranian nuclear ambition. Another facility is under construction a few miles south of Natanz, at Kūh-e Kolang Gaz Lā, nicknamed Pickaxe mountain. It will be even more deeply fortified than Fordow. Without a dramatic change in US policy, or more ingenuity, then, the Fordow Paradox is unlikely to be resolved any time soon. Iran's nuclear mountain will continue to loom large in Israeli thinking.
Telegraph
35 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Israeli spies smuggled munitions into Iran in suitcases
Israel spent months smuggling drone parts, munitions and precision equipment in suitcases, shipping containers and lorries into Iran in preparation for Friday's surprise attacks. Similar to Ukraine's recent covert operation in which agents launched kamikaze drones hidden in trucks at Russian bombers, Israel's spy agency had laid the groundwork to launch the bombings from inside Iran, people familiar with the operation told the Wall Street Journal. Mossad smuggled explosive-rigged quadcopter drones and other precision-guided equipment over sea and land to cripple Iran's anti-aircraft missiles before the strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. Citing former Mossad intelligence officers, Israeli military sources and unnamed persons familiar with the operation, the Wall Street Journal reported that small teams already in position near strategic sites took out a number of Iran's air-defence systems. They targeted dozens of missile launchers after they had emerged from shelters and were preparing to fire on the more than 200 Israeli warplanes racing across Iran's skies. F-35 jet fighters would eventually drop more than 330 munitions on over 100 targets, killing top military leaders and scientists in a strike Israel claimed was pre-emptive in order to damage the Islamic Republic's nuclear capacities. On Saturday, Israel released footage purporting to show its agents on Iranian soil deploying the attack systems that it said managed to severely limit Iran's immediate response. The exact date or location of the videos could not be independently verified. 'This is the deepest distance that we have operated so far in Iran,' Effie Defrin, Israeli military spokesman, told the Wall Street Journal. 'We created aerial freedom of action.' Mossad teams reportedly began preparing for the current drone operation years ago, using commercial trade to smuggle munitions and equipment into Iran, often without the knowledge of businesses whose cargo was being used as cover. A secret drone base was set up near Tehran, and Mossad commando team leaders trained in third countries were then returned to Iran where they prepared with small teams on the ground in central Iran at various strategic anti-aircraft sites when Israel's attack began. Iran has many more missiles than it does trucks to transport them, a battlefield bottleneck that Mossad took advantage of by hitting the surface-to-surface missile launchers while on trucks, or in the phase of being set up for launch.
