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Hello and welcome to Newsare. It's coming to live from the BBC World Service studios in central London.

I'm Tim Franks. We're beginning inside Iran, or as close as we can get to being inside Iran, because add to the fact that we, the BBC, have long not been allowed to operate inside the country.

The phone lines have been cut, the internet has been down for several days as the authorities try to disrupt protests across the country and prevent information on the bloody crackdown

leaving the country. What's changed today is that some international phone lines do appear

to be working again. It's patchy, but could it indicate that the authorities think they've regained

some control, that they're willing to allow some people some limited chance

to phone abroad. The other potentially big development today is what's happening at the White

House, with we're told a meeting of the President's military and intelligence chiefs to thrash out

all the options for possible American intervention, on top of which President Trump has already announced deployment

of one of his favourite weapons, the punitive tariff. More on that in a moment. First, Ranchet Habibi

Azad is a senior reporter with the BBC's Persian service. What's she been hearing with phone lines and some unofficial internet infrastructure working

off and on today?

What I've heard from inside Iran is that some people have managed to make calls originating

from Iran to outside.

And some people are connected via Starlink, which is Elon Musk's satellite internet

SpaceX. But I've also heard from people who are connected via Starlink that the authorities are

trying to jam signals. As a reporter for BBC Persian, we are not allowed to report freely from

inside Iran. So everything we are not allowed to report freely from inside Iran.

So everything we are seeing is us monitoring the situation.

And from the context that we have inside Iran, if Iran's fear is like a sea of information,

we could see a river of it.

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