Grief and Rubble in Kuhestak After Strike Hits Wedding Gathering
A U.S. strike on a wedding gathering in Kuhestak, southern Iran, has killed at least five people, with the U.S. saying it is investigating.
The entrance to the southern Iranian port town of Kuhestak is now lined with the faces of the dead. Posters bearing the names and portraits of those killed in Tuesday's strike — described as "martyrs" — greet visitors beside a banner mourning Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country's former supreme leader.
A Varta Wire journalist who visited the town on Friday documented the scene inside a home where a wedding celebration for a fisherman's daughter was underway when a U.S. missile struck. The footage shows a gaping hole in the ceiling, cracked walls, dust-covered slippers, and a cat picking its way through the debris of what was once a kitchen. A collapsed communications tower and a severely damaged telecommunications building nearby bear further witness to the force of the attack.
Iranian state media report that at least four people — two women and two children — were killed in the strike, with the death toll rising to five after an injured woman succumbed to her wounds in hospital on Thursday. More than 60 others were wounded. Heavy explosions shook the coastal town on Tuesday night, with security footage showing fireballs illuminating the sky.
The U.S. military has described its recent bombardment of southern Iran as targeting air defenses, radar systems, and maritime assets. Kuhestak lies along the strategic Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint that has become a central front in the six-month-old conflict. The town is located roughly 30 kilometers from Minab, where a separate U.S. missile strike on a primary school on February 28 killed more than 150 people, most of them children.
U.S. Vice President JD Vance said on Thursday that he had been briefed on the reported attack on the wedding and that the matter was being "investigated very fully." He maintained that the U.S. never targets civilians but acknowledged that "sometimes things happen." Captain Tim Hawkins, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, confirmed the military was looking into the reports but declined to say whether a formal investigation had been launched.