Iran accuses US of war crime after missile strike kills four at wedding

Late Tuesday evening in Kuhestak, a coastal city in Iran's Hormozgan province, a family was celebrating a wedding at a private home when a missile struck. The blast killed at least four people and wounded 68 guests. Among the dead were Amir-Ali Karimi, a four-year-old child, and Mohammad Mollahi, sixteen years old. The strike left wedding decorations scattered across rubble, shoes abandoned in the chaos of escape, and walls pocked with shrapnel holes. A caved-in roof and blown-out windows marked where moments before, people had been dancing.

Ali Mollahi, the bride's father, spoke to Mehr News in the aftermath, his words carrying the weight of sudden loss: he described himself as extremely worried and upset about what had occurred. Video footage from the scene showed women still wearing henna on their hands—the traditional decoration for a bride—standing in a nearby hospital watching injured children receive treatment. One injured child told state media that when the explosion happened, it was intensely violent: bricks, stones, and cement struck their face and head, and many others around them were hurt. A woman who had been at the wedding posted on Instagram afterward, her hands and feet still trembling as she recorded.

The US military said the overnight strikes targeted Iranian military infrastructure—air defense sites, radars, and maritime assets—as part of operations by US Central Command. A Centcom spokesperson, Tim Hawkins, acknowledged reports of civilian casualties but stated that the US military does not target civilians, unlike what he characterized as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. The question of whether the home itself was directly hit or whether a nearby strike sent debris into the structure remained unclear. CCTV footage captured at least six strikes in the area within a single minute. A separate missile appeared to strike a communications tower approximately 150 meters from the home. Authorities reported that several telecommunications and internet towers in the region sustained serious damage.

Weapons analysts examining shrapnel collected at the scene identified components belonging to the Standoff Land Attack Missile-Expanded Response, or Slam-Er, a 1,500-pound GPS-guided missile manufactured by Boeing and marketed as extremely accurate. The strike came after a month-long uneasy truce between the two countries had fractured. On Sunday, the US had launched strikes that prompted Iran to respond with drones and missiles targeting American bases across the Middle East, including installations in Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates.

Iran's foreign ministry spokesperson called the attack a war crime and said the country would respond with firmness to what officials characterized as savage crimes. Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, Iran's chief negotiator, posted on X that the attack had killed families with children and used inflammatory language to describe the US as the "great Satan." Iran's military spokesperson, Lieutenant Colonel Ebrahim Zolfaghari, vowed retaliation that would be "heavier, broader, and more crushing and devastating" than previous responses. A man filming the aftermath, his words captured by Fars news agency, addressed those responsible: "You wicked people have attacked people's homes and turned their wedding ceremony into a funeral."

The escalation reflects a broader struggle over control of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway through which at least 20 percent of the world's oil supply passed before the current conflict. Iran has virtually closed the strait since the war began, a move that has frustrated US President Donald Trump, who faces midterm elections amid high gas prices and inflation. The US has been systematically targeting Iran's communications and radar infrastructure along its coast in an attempt to degrade the country's ability to blockade shipping and to reopen the waterway to traffic.

This strike also follows a February incident in which a US missile killed at least 156 people, including more than 120 schoolchildren, at an elementary school. Independent investigations concluded the US likely carried out that strike with artificial intelligence assistance, though the US government said the matter remained under investigation. The wedding strike marks a return to direct military exchanges after weeks of relative calm, signaling the resumption of a cycle of escalation that regional observers fear could widen into something far larger.