Tehran launched retaliatory attacks on US military facilities across the region after the latest bombardment
US President Donald Trump has congratulated Secretary of War Pete Hegseth over the latest American strikes on Iran, despite one of the attacks hitting a wedding and killing several civilians.
Iranian authorities said two women and two children aged four and 16 were killed when a US munition hit a home hosting a wedding in Kuhestak, Hormozgan Province, on Tuesday. At least 67 others were wounded, many of them women and children.
According to weapons experts cited by AP and the New York Times, the fragments recovered at the site belonged to an American air-delivered guided munition, most likely a JSOW.
The Iranian Red Crescent has since asked the International Criminal Court to investigate the Kuhestak strike, while Iran’s UN envoy has urged the Security Council to condemn it.
US Central Command has said it is looking into the reports while insisting that American forces do not target civilians.
“You did a good job last night in Iran, by the way. You knocked the hell out of them,” Trump told Hegseth during an event at the White House on Wednesday. “We’re winning that one very big, by the way, in case you haven’t noticed,” he added, claiming that much of Iran’s naval and air capability has been destroyed.
Tehran responded to the latest wave of attacks by launching its own ballistic missiles and drones at US military facilities in Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the UAE, as well as Erbil in Kurdistan Region, Iraq.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) later claimed to have killed “a number of enemy elements” and destroyed several drones in a missile and UAV attack on Kuwait’s Ali Al Salem Air Base.
Kuwait acknowledged that its air defenses had intercepted incoming missiles and drones but reported no casualties. Jordan said ten of 13 ballistic missiles that entered its airspace were intercepted.
Tuesday’s wedding strike follows several other incidents in which US attacks have caused heavy civilian casualties in Iran. On the opening day of the war in February, a US strike hit an elementary school in Minab, killing 175 people, most of them children. On the same day, a US strike also killed at least 21 civilians, including seven children, in the southern Iranian city of Lamerd.
Tehran has accused Washington of war crimes throughout the conflict, reporting up to 3,000 civilian casualties since the US and Israel launched their campaign against the Islamic Republic in February.
