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Vice President JD Vance cast doubt on and downplayed the U.S.’s strike on a wedding in Iran earlier this week that killed at least four people, despite mounting evidence of U.S. culpability for the civilian killing.
“Sometimes things happen,” Vance said when asked about reports of the strike in a briefing on Thursday.
The strike through the roof of a home in which a wedding was being celebrated in southern Iran on Tuesday killed four people, reports say, including a 4-year-old child, and injured 68 others. Weapons experts and U.S. media reports have said that it was a direct hit to the home with a U.S. munition.
Vance said he’s “extremely skeptical” of the reports of the strike, and that the U.S. “never targets civilians in combat.” But he said that the U.S. is investigating the strike.
“We’re investigating it because obviously we care. We want to know. If we do make mistakes, again, this is a big difference between us and Iran: When our military makes mistakes, they learn from them to try to get better from them,” he said.
However, independent groups have found that the U.S. and Israel killed over 1,700 civilians in Iran between February and April, and have bombed hundreds of civilian sites, including hospitals, schools, and water and electrical infrastructure.
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This includes the horrific strike on an elementary school in Minab on the first day of the war that killed 168 people, most of them young children. Trump administration officials also claimed to be investigating that strike, which would be the single most deadly U.S. attack on civilians in decades if verified.
Reuters reported just days after the strike, in March, that an initial investigation found that the U.S. was responsible for the strike. Other reports pointed to the U.S. military recklessly using decades-old targeting data, fed into an AI system, to target the school.
But, as with many such investigations before it, the U.S. has never released the results of the probe, and has never admitted responsibility for the attack. This is despite Vance saying that the U.S. investigates itself in order to avoid future similar incidents.
Indeed, former top State Department human rights official Charles Blaha wrote this week that attacks like the wedding strike are directly downstream of U.S.’s refusal to acknowledge its culpability for the Minab massacre.
“In addition to taking responsibility, DoD should change its targeting procedures to better mitigate the risk of civilian casualties and, ideally, end its illegal war of choice against Iran,” Blaha said. “However, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s opposition to what he calls ‘stupid rules of engagement’ suggests that pressure for any changes designed to protect civilians in war must come from outside DoD.”
Vance’s comments are the latest instance of the Trump administration callously dismissing its violence against civilians on its various war fronts. In July, Trump said that he doesn’t believe “anyone’s ever going to be able to say what happened” in Minab — and went even further by falsely suggesting that images of the massacre were “AI-generated.”
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