Earlier Minab school strike killed 156 in targeting error
At the White House briefing, Vance dismissed the reporting when asked whether the US was responsible for the Kuhestak strike. “I will say that the Iranian state media has not been a very good scribe about what’s happened in the conflict thus far, so I’m extremely skeptical of this,” he said, offering no acknowledgment that the casualties had been confirmed by an internationally recognized humanitarian organization. “What I can say with 100% confidence is that, unlike the IRGC, the United States never targets civilians in combat. We never will do that. We never have done that, and unfortunately, obviously, sometimes things happen.”
The Iranian Red Crescent said shrapnel from the US missile strike hit the residential home where the wedding was under way, killing four people and wounding more than fifty others. The toll was not reported by the Iranian government, but by the Red Crescent, a member of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement that operates independently of Tehran and is generally treated by international monitors as a credible source on casualty figures.
Vance told reporters he had no new information on the specific strike, but said the US was investigating and, unlike Iran, learns from its mistakes. He also said the conflict between the US and Iran, which has stretched into a seventh month and led to the deaths of 18 US service members, was not presently “a war.”
That characterization drew immediate pushback. “It’s unbelievable gaslighting,” Congressman Ro Khanna, a Democrat of California, said in a video posted to X. “This is war. You know who understands it’s a war? Donald Trump. He claims that we’re winning the war.”
Earlier on Thursday, Trump claimed in a social media post that the US had “virtually unlimited” amounts of mid- to high-grade munitions, and called journalists who have reported on the Pentagon’s dwindling stockpiles “treasonous SCUM.”
US Central Command has said the broader strike package on Tuesday night targeted Iranian air defense sites, radar systems, maritime assets and communications facilities, without specifying whether the wedding venue was among the intended targets. The US and Iran exchanged fire earlier in the week, renewing fears of greater escalation across the region.
Iranian authorities have previously put the overall death toll from US and Israeli strikes “in the thousands” — figures that outside observers, including US-based monitoring groups, have broadly corroborated.
The Kuhestak strike also revives scrutiny of a February 28 US attack roughly 23 miles away, in Minab, that hit a school compound and killed at least 156 people, most of them schoolchildren. A preliminary US military inquiry reportedly found that strike resulted from a targeting error, after outdated coordinates identified the school as part of an adjacent Revolutionary Guard naval base. The Pentagon said at the time it was investigating; a full report has not been made public.