The US vice-president, JD Vance, said “sometimes things happen” when asked on Thursday whether an American strike was responsible for killing four people, including a child, at a wedding celebration in southern Iran this week.

The strike hit Kuhestak, a town in Sirik county on the strait of Hormuz. The toll was reported not by the Iranian government but by the Iranian Red Crescent, a member of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement that operates independently of Tehran and is generally treated by international monitors as a credible source on casualty figures.

Asked at a White House press briefing whether the US was responsible, Vance dismissed the reporting.

“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 said, offering no acknowledgment that the killings had been confirmed by an internationally recognized humanitarian body.

“What I can say with 100% confidence is that, unlike the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] IRGC, the United States never targets civilians in combat,” Vance continued. “We never will do that. We never have done that, and unfortunately, obviously, sometimes things happen.”

Vance told reporters that he had no new information on the specific strike, but that the US was investigating and, unlike Iran, learns from its mistakes.

He also said that the conflict between the US and Iran, which has now stretched into a seventh month, and led to the deaths of 18 US service members, was not presently “a war”. The comment sparked immediate backlash from Democrats and critics.

“It’s unbelievable gaslighting,” Congressman Ro Khanna, a Democrat of California, said in a video posted to X.

“This is war,” he added. “You know who understands it’s a war? Donald Trump. He claims that we’re winning the war.”

Earlier on Thursday, Trump claimed in a social media post that the US had “virtually unlimited” amounts of mid- to high-grade munitions, and called journalists who have reported on the Pentagon’s dwindling stockpiles “treasonous SCUM”.

The remarks come amid a broader US-Iran war that continues with no sign of a lasting peace despite months of halting negotiations.

The US and Iran exchanged fire earlier this week, renewing fears of greater escalation across the region. US Central Comman (Centcom) has said the broader strike package that Tuesday night targeted Iranian air defense sites, radar systems, maritime assets and communications facilities, without specifying whether the wedding venue was among the intended targets. The Red Crescent said shrapnel from the US missile strike hit the residential home where the wedding celebration was under way, killing four people and wounding more than 50 others.

Iranian authorities have previously put the overall death toll from US and Israeli strikes in the thousands, figures that outside observers, including US-based monitoring groups, have broadly corroborated.

The strike also revives scrutiny of a 28 February US attack roughly 23 miles away, in Minab, that hit a school compound and killed at least 156 people, most of them schoolchildren. A preliminary US military inquiry reportedly found that strike resulted from a targeting error, after outdated coordinates identified the school as part of an adjacent Revolutionary Guard naval base. The Pentagon said at the time it was investigating; a full report has not been made public.