Wedding Celebration Hit in Iran: JD Vance Faces Questions as US Launches Investigation

JD Vance told reporters he’s “extremely skeptical” that a US strike hit an Iranian wedding party. A New York Times visual investigation, published the same week, concluded a US-released bomb did exactly that — a contradiction Vance’s own White House briefing didn’t address.

“We’re investigating it because obviously we care. We want to know,” Vance said at the White House Wednesday, in his first formal press briefing since former press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s departure. “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 added that when the US military makes mistakes, “they learn from them to try to get better,” while insisting American forces “never target civilians in combat” and never will.

Iran’s account, which Vance was responding to, says the strike hit a home during a wedding ceremony in Kuhestak village, Sirik County, in southern Iran, killing four people and wounding roughly 70; Iranian state media reported a fifth victim, a 22-year-old woman, died later in hospital. The New York Times’ separate visual analysis, conducted with an independent weapons expert, concluded the wedding site was struck by a bomb released by American forces during strikes in the area — a specific, sourced finding that runs directly counter to Vance’s stated skepticism about the account’s origin, even if it doesn’t resolve whether the strike was deliberate or a targeting error.

The wedding strike is also not the deadliest incident Iran has alleged from this same period of fighting. Tehran says a separate strike hit a girls’ elementary school in the southern city of Minab, killing as many as 165 schoolgirls and teachers — a toll UN experts have called grounds for “deep concern,” according to RFE/RL’s reporting. The Pentagon has opened an investigation into that incident too, but has yet to report findings, meaning two of the war’s most serious civilian-casualty allegations from the same week remain officially unresolved weeks after they occurred.

Vance used the same briefing to reframe the conflict’s basic character in terms that understate its intensity. “I wouldn’t call it a war,” he said. “Right now, there is no active shooting,” adding that major combat operations effectively ended after about six weeks. Pressed on when the confrontation might end, he offered no timeline, framing the real open question as “when will the Iranians stop shooting at ships” — an answer he said only Tehran could provide. He also confirmed no active US-Iran talks are underway and won’t resume “unless they stop shooting at commercial” vessels, effectively acknowledging the diplomatic channel Vance himself once led in Islamabad and Lucerne talks remains closed.

That “not a war” framing sits awkwardly next to the briefing’s other half, in which Vance spent considerable time justifying continued US military action in the Strait of Hormuz specifically because “the Iranians are shooting at commercial shipping” — an active justification for ongoing force that’s difficult to square with a description of no active shooting. The contradiction reflects a broader pattern this conflict has produced: officials on both sides characterizing the same set of facts in whatever terms best serve their argument in the moment, whether that’s Iran’s contested casualty figures or Washington’s shifting language about whether a war is even still underway.

Whether the Pentagon’s investigations into the wedding and school strikes produce public findings that either confirm or dispute Iran’s death tolls will likely matter more for the war’s international legitimacy than anything said in Wednesday’s briefing — investigations announced with no findings reported are, at this stage, indistinguishable from investigations that never conclude at all.