US strike on Iranian wedding kills at least four, drawing war crime accusation

A US strike destroyed a wedding celebration in the southern Iranian city of Kuhestak early Wednesday, killing at least four people and wounding more than 50, Al Jazeera reported. The strike hit Sirik county in Hormozgan province, on Iran’s coast near the Strait of Hormuz.

Provincial officials named four of the dead: four-year-old Amir Ali Karimi, sixteen-year-old Mohammad Malahi, and two women, Kolsoum Malahi and Zarkhatoun Taheri, both 43. Sirik county governor Reza Shahidiyan said the wounded, including women and children, were taken to a hospital in the nearby city of Minab and were listed in stable condition.

The strike hit a residential building where the wedding was underway and destroyed a telecommunications tower near the shoreline, with multiple adjacent buildings damaged. Defense experts identified weapon fragments as consistent with an AGM-84K SLAM-ER, an air-launched precision-guided missile. Iranian state television reported that three US missiles were used in the attack.

CENTCOM spokesperson Tim Hawkins acknowledged reports of civilian casualties, which he said originated from Iranian state media, and said “The US military never targets civilians, unlike the IRGC.”

Esmaeil Baghaei, spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Affairs Ministry, called the strike the “true face” of what he described as an unlawful war, saying a wedding ceremony had been “brutally bombed.” Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said of US conduct in the war, “if a power acts like Satan, picks targets like Satan, and kills like Satan, it’s Satan.”

The Iranian Red Crescent Society documented the strike with photographs, including images of injured children, and wrote to the International Criminal Court’s Office of the Prosecutor asking for legal action against those responsible, Al Jazeera reported.

The Gulf Cooperation Council’s Secretary-General, Jasem Mohamed AlBudaiwi, separately condemned Iranian retaliatory strikes as violations of regional sovereignty, without addressing the wedding strike itself.

The wedding strike is the latest mass-casualty incident in a war that has repeatedly hit civilian sites. On February 28, an airstrike hit Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, in the same province, killing 156 people, 120 of them children, according to an investigation by Amnesty International. The rights group found the weapon used was consistent with a US-manufactured Tomahawk missile and said those responsible should be held accountable under international law. Iranian authorities ordered schools nationwide closed in the aftermath.

The war began on February 28, 2026, when the United States and Israel struck Iranian military and government sites after Tehran refused US demands to end nuclear enrichment, according to the Council on Foreign Relations’ conflict tracker. Pakistan mediated an interim ceasefire on June 14, meant to hold for sixty days and to include a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil consumption and 20 percent of its liquefied natural gas normally pass, according to the US Energy Information Administration. Both countries have since accused each other of violating the ceasefire, with Iran continuing to strike merchant shipping in the strait and the two sides trading strikes as recently as late August.

Neither the school strike nor Wednesday’s wedding strike has resulted in any announced US military review or disciplinary action.