When Iran’s missiles began flying on February 28, 2026, a second war was launched simultaneously, fought entirely with fabricated images, recycled videos, and outright lies. Within hours of the US-Israel strikes on Iran, Iranian state media flooded social platforms with battlefield “victories” that never happened, casualties that were invented, and dramatic footage pulled from video games in a coordinated disinformation operation on a scale that was simply staggering.
Since the United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran, NewsGuard, the news rating organization that monitors media credibility, identified 18 war-related claims by Iranian sources that were provably false. In the two weeks before the US-Israel strikes, NewsGuard had flagged just five false claims from Iranian outlets. The volume of lies tripled almost overnight.
The Iranian state-controlled outlet Tehran Times posted a satellite image on X on February 28 purporting to show the destruction of a US radar installation at Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar. The caption was unambiguous: “An American radar in Qatar was completely destroyed today in an Iranian drone strike.” The image showed a dramatic before-and-after of the site. There was one problem.
Information warfare analyst Tal Hagin traced the image back to a Google Earth photograph taken on February 2, 2025, a full month before the war began, that had been manipulated using AI. “One way to tell is that all the cars stayed in the exact same location,” Hagin wrote on X. The image had originated not inside Iran but from an X account called “Legitimate Targets” based in Austria.
Iranian state-linked sources also circulated a video on March 4 claiming to show a fighter jet shot down over Tehran, which Telegram channels linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) celebrated as evidence that Iran had downed a US F-15. The Israeli Air Force clarified that the footage was their own. It showed an Iranian Yak-130 being shot down over Tehran by an Israeli F-35. Iran’s propaganda had taken Israeli combat footage and repackaged it as an Iranian victory.
The semi-official outlet Mehr reported that four Iranian ballistic missiles struck the USS Abraham Lincoln, citing an IRGC statement as the source.
US Central Command responded on March 1 with a flat denial: “The Lincoln was not hit. The missiles launched didn’t even come close.”
Meanwhile, Tasnim, a military-aligned Iranian outlet, quoted an IRGC spokesperson claiming 650 US troops were killed or wounded in the first two days of fighting. CENTCOM confirmed that six US service members had been killed in the conflict, including troops killed in a March 1 Iranian drone attack on a US military facility at Port Shuaiba in Kuwait, a figure roughly 100 times smaller than what Iran was broadcasting to the world.
Video Games as War Documentation
Factnameh, a Persian-language fact-checking website, found that a clip widely shared across Telegram, X, Instagram, and Facebook — purportedly showing Iranian air defenses confronting an F-35 over Bandar Abbas — was extracted directly from the video game Arma 3. Agence France-Presse Fact Check documented that a clip supposedly showing missiles hitting Tel Aviv was actually footage of a Dubai warehouse fire from November 2025. DW Fact Check identified multiple AI-generated videos circulating as combat footage, including a fabricated video of a missile strike on a Tel Aviv building in which the antennas on the building collapse before the missile makes contact, and in which a building topples onto an adjacent structure that inexplicably remains intact. A viral post claiming “Dubai Airport out of service. Iranian Missiles ripped it apart” featured a clip with firefighters aiming a hose away from the fire, an aircraft with an extra wing, and crowds standing motionless next to burning wreckage, which are all telltale signs of AI generation.
A Wired investigation found hundreds of posts on X spreading false content about the conflict, with many appearing within minutes of actual missile strikes. One post viewed more than 4 million times claimed to show Iranian ballistic missiles over Dubai, but actually showed footage of an Iranian attack on Tel Aviv from October 2024. Another, with over 375,000 impressions, featured a fabricated before-and-after image of the compound of the late Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei.
Disinformation also targeted individuals. A video circulated claiming that the son of Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich had been killed, accompanied by footage of a grieving Israeli family. India Today Fact Check traced the video to an X post from July 10, 2025. It is footage from the funeral of Sergeant Moshe Shmuel Noll, a 21-year-old IDF soldier killed in Gaza. Smotrich confirmed publicly that his son Benya Hebron was wounded in a Hezbollah rocket attack near the Lebanese border, with shrapnel penetrating his back and lodging near a major blood vessel, but as of this writing, there is no confirmed report of his death.
Social media posts claimed that the Port of Haifa had burned to the ground after Iranian missiles struck the Haifa refinery, with numerous videos circulating purporting to show the inferno.
Separately, posts claimed that the entire city of Tel Aviv was left without electrical power as of 9:42 PM Eastern Time on Sunday, March 8, 2026, after Iran struck the Orot Rabin Power Plant with heavy missiles. Both claims spread rapidly across multiple platforms.
Neither claim holds up. No credible news organization confirmed a catastrophic fire at the Haifa port, and no verified reports corroborated a citywide Tel Aviv blackout following a strike on the Orot Rabin plant.
The specificity of the Tel Aviv claim, down to the exact timestamp, was almost certainly engineered to lend the story an air of credibility. That is a standard disinformation technique: anchor a fabrication with granular detail, and people stop asking whether the core claim is true.
The Haifa and Tel Aviv claims fit the broader Iranian disinformation pattern precisely. Launch a dramatic, vivid claim in the first hours of a news cycle. Attach footage, doesn’t matter if it’s real, recycled, or AI-generated. Let it reach millions before fact-checkers catch up. By then, the damage is done. The correction never travels as far as the lie.
Disinformation is quickly being presented as fact. Random accounts falsely reported that Ella Waweya, an Arab-Israeli serving as the IDF’s Arabic language spokesperson, was killed. Wikipedia has already been updated that she’s dead.
Waweya is alive and well and posting to her Instagram account as recently as three hours before this article was written. Wikipedia has adjusted the entry.
Iran’s disinformation machine functions because the Iranian regime has severed its own population from the global internet. On February 28, Cloudflare described Iran’s connectivity as a “near-complete shutdown,” with internet traffic down 98 percent compared to the prior week. With outside sources cut off, Iranians receive their news from state TV and radio, the state-controlled National Information Network, and a state-backed messaging app called Bale. All of these pump an uninterrupted stream of Iranian military triumphs to a population that has no way to verify or contradict what they are being told.
NewsGuard reported that Russia has been leveraging Iranian disinformation to undermine Ukraine and its Western allies, amplifying false Iranian claims that Iranian missiles destroyed Ukrainian military bases in Dubai.
The pattern is clear. Iran loses on the battlefield and wins, temporarily, on the internet. The fabrications are designed not primarily to deceive Western analysts, who will debunk them within hours, but to shape domestic Iranian opinion and to sow confusion internationally in the critical first hours of a news cycle. By the time the corrections circulate, the false images have already been seen by millions.
