Iranian Health Ministry officials said on Wednesday that a series of US strikes that hit targets across Iran’s southern coast on Tuesday killed at least 18 people and wounded 108.
Among the dead were security personnel and civilians, including civilians who were killed by a US strike that Iranian officials said hit a wedding ceremony in the southern city of Kuhestak in the Sirik country of Iran’s Hormozgan Province.
The deputy governor of the Hormozgan Province said Tuesday that at least five people, including a young child, were killed and 68 were wounded by the strike in Kuhestak, though Iranian reports on Wednesday put the death toll back down to four.
The four dead have been identified as four-year-old Amir Ali Karimi, 16-year-old Mohammad Malahi, 43-year-old Kolsoum Malahi and 43-year-old Zarkhatoun Taheri. The New York Times said that it verified videos of the strike hitting near the wedding.
Iranian officials strongly denounced the US strike as a war crime. “The truth of this unlawful war of choice – and the true face of the war crime – is in Sirik, where a wedding ceremony was brutally bombed as part of America’s desperate struggle to conceal its failure, not in AI-generated videos portraying American officials as triumphant heroes,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei wrote on X.
Iranian Parliament speaker Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf said that the strike and other US attacks that have killed civilians are evidence that the US is the “Great Satan.”
“If a power acts like Satan, picks targets like Satan, and kills like Satan, it’s Satan. Shields a junior Satan that does the same? It’s THE Great Satan,” Ghalibaf wrote on X.
Other US strikes on Tuesday hit Iran’s Qeshm Island, where at least three members of the paramilitary Basij force were killed, according to Drop Site News, which cited Iranian media. Strikes also hit targets far from the Strait of Hormuz, with four Iranian military personnel reported killed in the western Kermanshah Province and seven Iranians killed in the Khuzestan Province.
In its retaliatory attacks, Iran targeted US bases in Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, and Bahrain. The IRGC claimed it inflicted casualties on US troops in Jordan, but so far that hasn’t been confirmed.
