Iran war ramps back up as Tehran accuses U.S. of bombing wedding party, attacks Gulf states

Iran’s IRIB state television network reported Wednesday that a wedding celebration in the southern province of Hormozgan was struck by three missiles, killing at least four people and leaving dozens more wounded.

The Iranian foreign ministry earlier said a U.S. strike hit the party in a private home in southern Hormozgan province’s Sirik district, killing and wounding some 50 people. 

The state TV report put the total number of casualties at just under 70, with six people said to be in critical condition.

IRIB interviewed a man identified as Mr. Malahi, a local fisherman who said the wedding was for his daughter.

The IRIB reporter said one missile crashed through the roof of the room where the party was underway, leaving a roughly five-foot crater in the floor, while another struck a palm tree in the courtyard before destroying a wall of the home.

The U.S. military did not immediately confirm or deny reports that an American airstrike hit a wedding party in southern Iran on Tuesday evening.

The Associated Press and the New York Times cited officials with U.S. Central Command as saying Wednesday that the command was aware of the reports, but that “the U.S. military never targets civilians, unlike the IRGC,” referring to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Iranian state TV said the strike killed at least four people attending a wedding celebration in a home in the southern Hormozgan province. 

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its central military command, in a series of statements posted overnight, claimed to have targeted at least seven military bases across the region where U.S. forces are or have been based.

The bases mentioned by the IRGC and the military include Camp Tabrin and Prince Hassan Base in Jordan. The IRGC claimed to have killed multiple U.S. personnel in a ballistic missile strike on Camp Tabrin, but U.S. Central Command dismissed that claim, and the camp is not a U.S. base, as the IRGC suggested.

The U.S. military does not maintain any bases inside Jordan. There are several facilities in the kingdom where Jordan’s military hosts U.S. forces, including the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, where three U.S. soldiers were killed in an Iranian missile strike in July, and which has been targeted again this week, and the Prince Hassan Air Base.

Iran’s armed forces also claimed attacks overnight on the sprawling bases in Erbil, northern Iraq, Ali Al Salem in Kuwait, the vital U.S. Naval Base in Bahrain and the Al Dhafra and Al Minhad bases in the United Arab Emirates. 

There was no confirmation of Iranian weapons impacting any of the bases by the U.S. military, and both Bahrain and Jordan said the missiles and drones were either intercepted or landed without causing any damage. 

Iran’s foreign ministry accused the U.S. of killing or wounding more than 50 people with an airstrike that hit a wedding party in a private home on Tuesday evening in the country’s south.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei said in a post on X that the home in Kuhestak, in the southern Hormozgan province’s Sirik district, “was brutally attacked tonight while families were celebrating a wedding. More than 50 innocent men, women and children were martyred or wounded.”

Baqaei referred to the purported strike as the latest in a “chain of atrocities” that he said included the strike on a school in Minab early in the war that killed dozens of children. The United States was “likely” responsible for the deadly attack on the school, but did not intentionally target the facility and may have hit it in error, possibly due to the use of dated intelligence which wrongly identified the area as still part of an Iranian military installation, a person briefed on the preliminary intelligence told CBS News in March. 

There was no immediate comment from U.S. officials on the allegation of a wedding party being hit by an American strike Tuesday in southern Iran.

“More dangerous than the bomb itself is the normalization of bombing; and more dangerous than silence is the conversion of silence into legitimacy. Iran will respond to these savage crimes with firmness,” said Baqaei, warning that “those who remain silent today will not be immune to its consequences tomorrow. Turning a blind eye to injustice does not contain it; it only emboldens the perpetrators.”

Oil prices were still up early Wednesday after Iran and the U.S. traded another volley of airstrikes. The return to direct hostilities this week could dim market hopes that the war might have been close to wrapping up.

International benchmark Brent crude oil traded just below $96 a barrel for November deliveries on Tuesday night, but dropped slightly to sell for around $95 early Wednesday morning. U.S. staple crude West Texas Intermediate was trading at over $90 a barrel.

Both benchmark crude prices have risen between 1% and 2% per day since fighting resumed over the weekend, putting them each about 40% higher compared to a year ago, before the Iran war severely limited tanker traffic through the vital Strait of Hormuz.

In a social media post defending the U.S. position in the Iran war, President Trump asked Tuesday, “When are the Iranian people going to rise up and fight?”

Mr. Trump said in the Truth Social post that the Iranian regime is “just playing out the inevitable,” with its “economy totally collapsing,” and said: “I couldn’t care less if they sign a worthless, to them, agreement.”

Mr. Trump’s call for the Iranian people to “rise up” echoed his message hours after the war began in late February, when he urged Iranians to “take over your government.” He also encouraged Iranian protesters to take to the streets before the war began.

Later, however, as a war he initially said would take a few weeks stretched on for months, Mr. Trump backed away from calling for the Iranian regime’s ouster, saying he “never cared about regime change” and considered the deaths of top Iranian officials to be a kind of regime change. 

He has also, at various times, sought to negotiate a peace deal with the regime, calling what he has portrayed as the country’s new leadership “very rational” in June.

The U.S. military’s Central Command said Tuesday evening that the latest round of strikes on Iran was complete.

“U.S. forces struck Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) targets including air defense sites, radar systems, maritime assets and facilities, mine laying capabilities, and communications sites,” CENTCOM said in a statement shared on social media.

Jordan’s military said early Wednesday that the kingdom was “subjected … to a missile attack originating from Iranian territory,” marking the second apparent attack in recent days.

The Jordanian armed forces said 13 ballistic missiles were detected, of which 10 were intercepted and three fell in remote areas. No injuries or deaths were reported.

Iranian state media claimed U.S. forces were killed in the strike on Jordan, but a U.S. official told CBS News that was not true.

The strikes on Jordan — a key U.S. ally that hosts American forces — came after Iran announced it had fired missiles and drones in response to U.S. airstrikes on Tuesday.

Iran’s armed forces also targeted a military base in Bahrain with attack drones, Iran’s semi-official Fars and Tasnim news agencies said early Wednesday. 

Bahrain’s state news agency later confirmed that Iranian drones had been intercepted.

President Trump warned Iran against retaliating against the U.S. for the latest American strikes on Tuesday.

“If they retaliate, they’ll be hit much harder. And if they do it again, they’ll be no longer,” the president told Fox News’ Trey Yingst.

Iran said earlier Tuesday that it was responding to the new U.S. strikes with drone and missile attacks targeting U.S. forces in the region.

Asked if he was interested in a deal to end the war with Iran, which the Trump administration has sought on and off for months, the president said: “I think an agreement with them isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. We gave them a lot of chances.”