Iran’s missile attacks on two Iraqi airbases have been accompanied by a spread of online disinformation, falsely labelled images and claims of news sources being hacked, which have added to jitters in the region regarding the attacks.

Iranian state television said on Wednesday that at least 80 “American terrorists” were killed, despite the US making clear that it had not sustained any casualties as a result of rocket attacks on Iraqi military bases hosting American troops. The attacks occurred in retaliation for the US’s assassination of the powerful Iranian general Qassem Suleimani.

Iran has a long history of running state-backed disinformation campaigns which attempt to influence opinion overseas, with Facebook regularly banning Iranian pages it believes are spreading false and divisive material aimed at audiences in the US and UK.

Twitter suspended an account impersonating the Israeli journalist Jack Khoury, which had been used to promote false claims that hundreds of US soldiers had been injured in the attacks and claimed they had been secretly evacuated to a hospital in Tel Aviv by a military aircraft.

“A fake account impersonating me was pushing fake news with my name on it. It has been suspended from Twitter,” said the real Khoury, who works for Haaretz newspaper.

Kuwait’s state news agency, Kuna, has claimed its Twitter account was hacked after it was used to claim that US troops would be withdrawing from the Gulf kingdom, which borders Iraq.

The initial report had said Kuwait’s defence minister had received a letter from a US commander “declaring imminent withdrawal of all US military forces in three days.

“Receiving such [a] letter from Camp Arifjan was unexpected and we are communicating with US Department of Defense for more details and information,” Kuna initially reported the minister as saying, before swiftly retracting the story.

Kuna now claims the report did not originate from the agency and was posted on Twitter as a result of a hack, although it did not suggest who might be to blame for uploading the specific information.

Images and video purporting to show the rockets being launched from Iran spread across social media, many of them instead showing footage from previous Iranian military drills or rocket launches from elsewhere in the world. In one incident, footage from the war in Ukraine dating back to 2015 was posted by individuals claiming it showed the missiles hitting the Iraqi bases.

Some of the accounts sharing the disinformation purport to be authentic news sources but as yet there is no indication they are part of any coordinated state-sponsored disinformation campaign. Many appear to be posting dramatic material that will gain followers and shares from social media users looking for real information, who are unaware they are helping to spread false footage.

There has also been unsubstantiated online speculation regarding the crash of a Boeing 737-800 operated by Ukraine International Airlines. The plane crashed early on Wednesday morning shortly after taking off from Tehran, killing all 176 passengers and crew. Iran has refused to hand over the black box from the plane to the US manufacturer, adding to speculation over the crash, which occurred only hours after the missile attack on Iraq.