Vance Says "Things Happen"

The U.S. military never targets civilians. It only ever accidentally hits them, at scale, repeatedly, and then investigates the wreckage of its own claims.

"What I can say with 100% confidence is that unlike the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the United States never targets civilians in combat. We never will do that. We never have done that. And unfortunately, obviously, sometimes things happen."

— Vice President JD Vance, White House briefing, Thursday

On Tuesday night, a wedding was taking place in Kuhestak, a small coastal town in southern Iran's Sirik County. Ali Mallahi, the father of the bride and the owner of the building, had gathered family for the ceremony. A U.S. munition came through the roof.

Four people died: Zarkhatoon Taheri, 50; Kolsum Mallahi, 43; Mohammad Mallahi, 16; and Amirali Karimi, four. At least 68 others were injured. Iranian state TV carried Mallahi's face as he described what was left of his daughter's wedding. "It is a very saddening incident," he said. "Thank God the casualties were not higher."

On Thursday, Vice President JD Vance was asked about it. His answer: "Sometimes things happen."

The claim of innocence was tested within days. A Reuters analysis of photos and video from the site, reviewed by weapons experts, concluded the strike was likely a direct hit by a U.S. munition. Weapons identification expert Trevor Ball said the fragments left in the rubble were consistent with Boeing's Stand-Off Land Attack Missile, a precision weapon the company once described in a press release as "the most accurate" in the Navy's arsenal. BBC Verify independently confirmed the destruction of a telecommunications tower about 112 meters from the wedding house and severely damaged homes in the same line of fire.

The precision is the part that does not fit the story. A stray bomb, a miscue, a bad coordinate, a miscalculation. These are the explanations that make "things happen" plausible. A munition that changed its course mid-air to hit its target, striking the roof of a known residential building during a family gathering, is a different kind of thing.

U.S. Central Command's response was delivered the same day by spokesperson Captain Tim Hawkins: "The U.S. military never targets civilians, unlike the IRGC."

Translation: the military is aware the missile hit a house full of people, and its only available response is to define civilian harm out of existence.

This is not an isolated malfunction. It is the same machinery as the one that killed 168 people, most of them children, in the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, on the first day of the war. Minab is a couple dozen miles from Kuhestak.

In March, Reuters reported that an initial internal Pentagon investigation had found that U.S. forces were "likely" responsible for the Minab school strike. That finding was never released. In June, the Pentagon said the investigation was being "finalized." Six months later, the results have not been made public. In July, President Trump dismissed responsibility for the Minab massacre and falsely suggested that images of the dead children were "AI-generated."

Former State Department human rights official Charles Blaha wrote this week that attacks like the wedding strike are directly downstream of the U.S. refusal to acknowledge its culpability for Minab. "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," he said.

The pattern is not accidental. It is structural. And it is being defended in real time, by the person second in command.

The data tells a story that is difficult to reconcile with "things happen."

Human Rights Activists News Agency documented that between February 28, when the war began, and April 7, when a ceasefire was reached, at least 1,701 civilians were killed in Iran, including at least 307 children. Over the war's first 40 days, 77% of the 6,324 verified incidents HRANA documented involved either civilian harm or damage to civilian objects. The group identified patterns that raise serious concerns under international humanitarian law: apparent failures in target verification, use of artificial intelligence with minimal human oversight, inadequate warnings, large explosive weapons in populated areas, repeated "double-tap" strikes, and attacks targeting widespread civilian infrastructure.

Wes J. Bryant, who served as the Pentagon's chief of civilian harm assessments and now works as a war crimes analyst, told Al Jazeera this week: "Is the US intentionally targeting civilians in Iran? It is." He added that every target location is recorded at multiple levels throughout the chain of command, meaning the military would have been able "to report within hours" if a school or wedding was struck.

The Iranian Red Crescent has formally referred the U.S. to the International Criminal Court, citing the wedding strike as a potential war crime.

CodePink, the anti-war activist group, has documented at least ten other instances since 2001 in which U.S. forces have struck wedding parties, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen. In 2008, a U.S. air strike in the Afghan village of Wech Baghtu killed 47 civilians who were on their way to a wedding, including the bride. In 2013, a drone strike in Yemen hit a wedding convoy.

The U.S. has bombed at least eight wedding parties since 2001. That is not a pattern of "things happening." That is a pattern.

Danaka Katovich, national codirector of CodePink, said the administration did not do this by accident. "They are not winning the war, and they are running out of munitions, and they have no public support," she said. "They are resorting to tactics that attempt to inflict mass civilian harm."

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., has said the war must end before the November midterms, or it may become "another endless war."

The Iranian Red Crescent said the attack must be prosecuted at The Hague. Iranian authorities said four more people, including a child, were killed in strikes elsewhere in southern Iran on the same night. Iran launched missiles and drones at U.S. targets in Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq, and Bahrain in retaliation.

The administration's response has been to say it is investigating. The word "investigating" is doing a lot of work in this sentence. It is the word that means the Pentagon is looking at its own records and deciding what to say about them. It is the word that means the results may never come out. It is the word that means the four people dead in Kuhestak are, as far as the U.S. military is concerned, a matter of procedure.

The question is not whether the missile hit the wedding. The question is whether "things happen" is a phrase a government can use to describe killing children, and get away with it, and then do it again.