At least five people are dead, and 68 more are reportedly injured after the US bombed a wedding party in Southern Iran on Tuesday, an act that Iranian officials called a “war crime.”<\/p>\n
The Iranian embassy posted a video from a hospital showing several people, including what appears to be a young child, being treated for severe wounds from the attack, which occurred at a private home in the city of Kuhestak, Hormozgan province.<\/p>\n
At least two children\u20144-year-old Amir-Ali Karimi and 16-year-old Mohammad Mollahi\u2014were killed, according to Iranian officials.<\/p>\n
“Bombing wedding parties used to be a trademark of the US, while Trump was known for targeting schools and hospitals,” the social media<\/a> account for Iran’s embassy in Austria<\/a> said Wednesday morning. “Now, however, Trump\u2019s obsession with war crimes<\/a> has gone to another level.”<\/p>\n The bombing of the wedding party was part of a barrage of strikes launched by US Central Command (CENTCOM) on Tuesday across Iran, which it said<\/a> targeted Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) sites in response to Iranian attacks on ships and US personnel near the Strait of Hormuz.<\/p>\n CENTCOM spokesperson Capt. Tim Hawkins told<\/a> the Associated Press that the command was aware of reported civilian casualties<\/a>, but noted that the reports \u201coriginated from Iranian state media.\u201d He said, “The US military<\/a> never targets civilians, unlike the IRGC.” He did not specify what military purpose the attack on the wedding ceremony served.<\/p>\n The Iranian Red Crescent, which released a video<\/a> showing the destroyed house, called for the International Criminal Court<\/a> (ICC<\/a>) to investigate the attack.<\/p>\n “Given the reported civilian character of the location as the venue of a family wedding ceremony, as well as the presence of civilians at the site, the incident raises serious concerns under international humanitarian law and warrants an independent, impartial, thorough, and effective investigation,\u201d the Red Crescent said<\/a> in a letter to the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor.<\/p>\n It added that if investigators determine there was no lawful military objective for the strike or that civilian harm was knowingly excessive, the attack could amount to a war crime by the individuals involved.<\/p>\n Yemen\u2019s National Human Rights<\/a> Commission likewise condemned<\/a> the attack as “a full-fledged war crime and a blatant violation of international humanitarian law and the four Geneva Conventions,” which forbid the targeting of civilians and safe residential areas.<\/p>\n Iranian media reported that the US had also hit several other civilian sites along the southern coast on Tuesday, including a civilian airport. In total, at least 18 people were killed<\/a> on Tuesday, according to the state broadcaster IRIB.<\/p>\n Tuesday’s attacks came after Trump issued more threats<\/a> of civilizational destruction against Iran.<\/p>\n “If the failed Nation of Iran retaliates for this very justified attack, they will be hit again at a much harder and higher level, but it will not be the biggest attack of them all, that is waiting in the wings and, when it is over, there will be very little left of the Islamic Republic of Iran!\u201d he posted Tuesday on Truth Social.<\/p>\n Later on Tuesday night, he emphasized<\/a> that if Iran retaliated, “they’ll be no longer.” He dismissed the idea of returning to negotiations with Iran, stating that “an agreement with them isn\u2019t worth the paper it\u2019s written on.” Iran has said<\/a> it wants to reopen talks with Trump if he agrees to abide by the terms of the memorandum of understanding he agreed to in June.<\/p>\n After attempting and largely failing to implement a global strategy of coordinated economic isolation, Trump returned<\/a> to bombing Iran for the first time in a month this weekend.<\/p>\n Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, remarked<\/a> that the US had bombed the wedding “roughly ten days after the Trump administration<\/a> claimed its new sanctions<\/a> on Iran would make military action unnecessary.”<\/p>\n Iran appears to have been undeterred by Trump’s threats, with Esmaeil Baghaei, the spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, vowing that Tehran<\/a> would “respond to these savage crimes with firmness.”<\/p>\n He called the attacks part of a “catalog of atrocities” against Iran, including the US bombing<\/a> of an elementary school that killed 150 people, mostly children<\/a>, during the war’s opening salvo on February 28.<\/p>\n The IRGC claimed<\/a> on Wednesday that in retaliation for the wedding bombing, its forces launched strikes that killed US personnel and destroyed drones and military facilities at the Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait. Iran also said it launched ballistic missiles at US bases in Bahrain<\/a>, Jordan, and Iraq.<\/p>\n As of Wednesday morning, the US has not commented on the claim that US personnel were killed. Kuwait reported intercepting the drones and missiles but did not report any casualties, according to Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n Baghaei said the attack on the wedding ceremony was a “war crime” that was part of an “unlawful war of choice” and that the wedding party was “brutally bombed as part of America\u2019s desperate struggle to conceal its failure.”<\/p>\n He separately condemned nations that have remained silent in the face of other US attacks against Iranian civilians. The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) reports that more than 1,700 civilians were killed during the war’s initial stage, between the end of February and mid-April, at least 1,700 Iranian civilians were killed<\/a> in US and Israeli attacks.<\/p>\n “More dangerous than the bomb itself is the normalization of bombing,” Baghaei said. “And more dangerous than silence is the conversion of silence into legitimacy.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At least five people are dead, and 68 more are reportedly injured after the US bombed a wedding…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":275352,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[5574,4625,34,196,309,343,2773],"class_list":["post-275351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-iran","tag-children","tag-international-law","tag-iran","tag-iran-war","tag-trump-administration","tag-us-military","tag-war-crimes"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/117202818583893440","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275351\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}