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A strike on an alleged drug-trafficking boat in the eastern Pacific Ocean killed four people, the US military said, amid a growing controversy over a campaign that has taken more than 87 lives.
Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and US President Donald Trump's administration have especially come under fire over an incident in early September in which US forces targeted the wreckage of a vessel that had already been hit, killing two survivors.
A senior Democratic politician who saw footage of that incident said it showed a US attack on "shipwrecked sailors," while others have described it as a possible war crime.
The latest strike targeted a "vessel in international waters operated by a Designated Terrorist Organisation. Intelligence confirmed that the vessel was carrying illicit narcotics and transiting along a known narco-trafficking route in the Eastern Pacific," US Southern Command said in a post on X.
"Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed," said the post, which included a video showing a multi-engine boat speeding across the water before being hit by a blast that left the vessel engulfed in flames.
Earlier in the day, politicians attended a classified briefing on Capitol Hill in which they were shown extended video footage of the strike, only a brief part of which has been publicly released.
Representative Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, described it as "one of the most troubling things I've seen in my time in public service."
Republican Senator Tom Cotton, another attendee of the briefing, defended the military action, saying "the first strike, the second strike, and the third and the fourth strike on 2 September were entirely lawful and needful, and they were exactly what we'd expect our military commanders to do."
However, both the White House and Pentagon have sought to distance Mr Hegseth from the decision to strike the survivors, instead pinning the blame on Admiral Frank Bradley, who directly oversaw the operation.
Mr Himes said Mr Bradley told politicians during the briefing that Mr Hegseth did not order that all the boat's crew be killed, but Republican Representative Don Bacon said the Pentagon chief is ultimately responsible because "he's the secretary of defence."
Mr Trump's administration insists it is effectively at war with alleged "narco-terrorists," and the president has deployed the world's biggest aircraft carrier and an array of other military assets to the Caribbean, insisting they are there for counter-narcotics operations.
Regional tensions have flared as a result of the strikes and the military buildup, with Venezuela's leader Nicolas Maduro accusing the US of using drug trafficking as a pretext for "imposing regime change" in Venezuela.
