The Times of Israel is liveblogging Sunday’s events as they happen.
Houthis vow to respond to US ‘war crime’ after large-scale strikes on Yemen’s capital
The Houthi-run health authorities in Yemen say that at least 13 civilians were killed and nine injured in US strikes on Yemen’s capital Sanaa.
At least 11 others, including four children and one woman, were killed and 14 were injured in a US strike on the northern province of Saada, the Houthi-run Al-Masirah TV reports.
The Houthis’ political bureau describes the attacks as a “war crime.”
“Our Yemeni armed forces are fully prepared to respond to escalation with escalation,” it says in a statement.
Hundreds of thousands take to the streets as anti-corruption protest engulfs Serbia’s capital
A sea of people converged in Serbia’s capital Belgrade yesterday in what was the largest of a series of anti-corruption demonstrations that have upended the Balkan country in recent months.
At one point the crowd stretched for nearly two kilometres, with people filling the streets in and around the parliament and the capital’s main pedestrian square.
“We have gathered in the streets primarily to express our complete dissatisfaction after years of dictatorship, lawlessness, and corruption,” said one demonstrator, Ognjen Djordjevic, a 28-year-old resident from Belgrade.
The movement formed after 15 people were killed when a railway station roof collapsed in the city of Novi Sad in November, igniting long-simmering anger over alleged corruption and lax oversight in construction projects.
After the rally, the interior ministry said that at least 107,000 people had turned out.
The Public Assembly Archive — a group that monitors crowd size — gives a much higher figure. It estimates that between 275,000 to 325,000 people took to the streets.
If that estimate is correct, it would make the protest one of the largest in Serbia’s recent history.
???????? Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, right now. pic.twitter.com/Oir4292B51
— Visioner (@visionergeo) March 15, 2025
Houthis say at least 15 killed in intense wave of US strikes
Yemen’s Houthi rebels say that US strikes have killed at least 15 people, including children, after President Donald Trump announced an attack on the Iran-backed group.
The Houthi’s Ansarallah media raises an earlier death toll of nine, reporting strikes hitting the capital Sanaa as well as the northern Saada region.
Freed hostage Tal Shoham says his Hamas captors ‘never stopped digging tunnels’ in terror group’s underground network
Former hostage Tal Shoham tells Fox News that from June 2024 until his release on February 22, he was held underground in Gaza by captors who were responsible for digging the tunnels that make up Hamas’s vast underground network in the Palestinian enclave.
He was held in the small underground room along with Omer Wenkert — who was released alongside him — and Evyatar David and Guy Gilboa Dalal, both of whom are still in captivity.
He says that their captors would constantly dig tunnels even as they guarded the four men.
“Hamas never stopped digging tunnels,” Shoham says. “Not for a single day.”
In July 2024, it was reported that Hamas’s tunnel network was still in a “good functional state” despite the many months of war, and the IDF’s attempts to destroy it.
Their captors provided them with just 300 milliliters of water a day, Shoham tells Fox, and they were given plain rice to eat, which resulted in severe malnutrition. After months in which he was getting progressively more unwell due to the diet of just several hundred calories a day, Shoham says a doctor finally came to see him. By that point, he says, he had already developed a severe infection, and had internal bleeding in his legs.
He says the doctor gave him vitamin supplements to combat the malnutrition, which “tasted like dog food, but it dramatically improved our condition.”
Despite the supplements, Shoham was severely underweight upon his release from Gaza.
Ex-hostage Tal Shoham says he refused to kneel to Hamas captors, wouldn’t show them he was afraid
Released hostage Tal Shoham, who was returned to Israel on February 22, publicly shares details of his 505 days in captivity for the first time, in an interview with Fox News.
Shoham was taken hostage from Kibbutz Be’eri, where he and his family had been visiting his wife Adi’s parents over the Simchat Torah holiday.
Adi was also taken hostage, along with their two children Yahel, then 3, and Naveh, 8. The three were released during the weeklong truce in November 2023.
Shoham tells Fox that he didn’t initially know what had become of his wife and children, as he had been taken hostage separately after he stepped outside to surrender, hoping it would spare the lives of his loved ones.
He recalls being driven into Gaza, hauled out of the trunk of the car he was transported in, and told to kneel. At this point, he says, he believed he was about to be killed.
“I said ‘I can’t control whether you kill me or not,’ and I raised by hands — but I refused to kneel’,” he tells Fox, adding that he told his captors: “If you want to kill me, kill me, but you will not execute me like ISIS.”
As he was taken hostage ahead of his family, Shoham says he spent his first 50 days in captivity not knowing whether his wife and children were alive or dead.
“Never in my life have I experienced suffering like this,” he says of that uncertainty. To survive, Shoham says he had to “accept that my family was dead.”
“I sat on the floor and imagined myself at their funeral. I stood in front of a grave — one large for my wife, and two small for my children — and I eulogized each of them,” he recalls. “I sobbed but didn’t let my captors see me cry. That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, burying my family in my mind.”
On his 50th day in captivity, however, Shoham says he received a letter from his wife informing him that she and their two children were alive, and being released from captivity.
Knowing that his family was safe was the “most important thing,” Shoham says. “I didn’t need to be a father and husband protecting them anymore. Now, I could focus on my war, the one I knew how to fight, the one for survival.”