TEHRAN (Dispatches) – Iran has slammed the international community’s silence on Saudi airstrikes on Yemen, the latest of which killed at least 31 civilians in the war-hit country’s al-Jawf province Friday, calling it a war crime.
"The international community’s silence on these war crimes has emboldened their perpetrators to kill more civilians,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi said in Tehran on Sunday.
The United Nations office in Yemen said preliminary field reports indicated that "as many as 31 civilians were killed and 12 others injured in strikes that hit al-Hayjah area” in al-Jawf province.
The health ministry in al-Jawf province said women and children were among those killed, Yemen’s al-Masirah TV reported. They were attacked as they gathered near the wreckage of a Saudi warplane shot down on Friday evening.
The spokesman condemned "the criminal attack by the Saudi-led coalition forces and offered commiserations to the bereaved families and the oppressed Yemeni people,” IRNA news agency reported.
"Over the past several years, we have repeatedly witnessed that whenever Saudi-led coalition forces or their allies suffer humiliating defeats in the battlefield, they react by cowardly slaughtering women, children and civilians with American weapons,” Mousavi said.
"Yesterday’s crime in Jawf province is just one example among dozens of their war crimes,” he added.
Saudi Arabia’s state-run news agency quoted military spokesman Col. Turki al-Maliki Saturday as saying that the tornado warplane belonging to the kingdom’s air force had been shot down over the province of Jawf on Friday.
Yemeni forces said they shot down the warplane with an advanced surface-to-air missile.
The spokesman for Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement called the shoot-down a "fatal blow” to the aggressors, saying it indicated that Yemeni air defense units have made significant progress in the field of defense.
"The downing of the Tornado fighter jet in the skies of Jawf dealt a deadly blow to the Saudi aggressors,” Mohammad Abdulsalam said on Sunday, according to Al-Masirah news channel.
"This shows that Yemeni air defense units have made great progress in the field of (anti-aircraft) defense,” he said.
Stressing that Yemeni troops and popular forces will retaliate against recent air raids conducted by Saudi warplanes on Jawf that killed over 30 civilians, including women and children, Abdulsalam said, "The enemy, by committing such violent crimes, is seeking to cover up its consecutive defeats.”
The Houthi Ansarullah movement released a video of its Friday shoot-down of the Tornado fighter jet.

According to General Yahya Saree the multi-role combat aircraft was downed with an advanced surface to air missile.
The video of the downing was released on Saturday by Yemen’s Al-Masirah TV.
The TV channel has also released a video of the plane wreckage, and the Houthi fighters searching the crash site.
The Yemeni army has devised and manufactured its own ballistic missiles and combat drones, which has changed power balance against the failing Saudi-led coalition.
In March 2015, Saudi Arabia, with the help of a number of its allies, particularly the United Arab Emirates (UAE), launched a brutal military campaign against impoverished Yemen, whose former President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi had fled to Riyadh a few months earlier after stepping down the previous year.
The Saudi-led campaign, code-named Operation Decisive Storm, was launched to achieve two main objectives: bringing Hadi, a staunch ally of Riyadh, back to power, and crushing the Houthi Ansarullah movement, whose fighters have proved to be of significant help to the Yemeni army in defending the Arab country against the invaders since the onset of the imposed war.
However, despite spending millions of dollars and employing foreign mercenaries, particularly from Sudan, the Saudi regime has deeply bogged down in Yemen and has practically failed in achieving both of its objectives.