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00:00Let's go to the breaking story coming out of Israel.
00:02Ronan Barr has announced he's to resign as head of Israel's Shin Bet security service.
00:07This was a controversy where he revealed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
00:10ordered him to be loyal to him rather than to the state.
00:13Netanyahu is denying the allegation, but Ronan Barr has held firm.
00:16He gave notice that he's to quit at a special event
00:19to honor fallen service personnel at Shin Bet headquarters.
00:22This is now scheduled for June the 15th, his resignation.
00:26Let's bring in Noga Tarnopolsky, our correspondent in Jerusalem,
00:29for more on this one. Noga, what more can you add?
00:35Well, it really leaves Israel hanging even more than it's been hanging until now,
00:40if you can imagine that.
00:42In a way, Ronan Barr's decision to resign was completely expected.
00:47He runs an agency, a security agency, that failed completely in its task
00:52on October 7th, 23, which was to warn Israel that danger was incoming.
00:58And from the point of view of many people, including some of his supporters,
01:02he should have resigned a long time ago.
01:04But he held on because of the aberrant situation in Israel
01:08in which the entire governing coalition,
01:12the entire government that oversaw the disaster
01:14and that oversaw the policy of funding Hamas
01:18and of viewing Hamas as a partner, or to quote the finance minister,
01:22as an asset before the disaster remained in place
01:27and not only refused to resign but refused to even appoint a commission of inquiry.
01:31And so he remained as a kind of corollary to this stagnation
01:39in the political and military leadership of Israel.
01:43His resignation may burn off the government's threat
01:48made yesterday by the prime minister himself,
01:51which was that if the Supreme Court rules that his firing was illegal,
01:55as it appears to have been,
01:58yesterday the prime minister threatened simply to ignore the Supreme Court
02:03if it were to rule that way.
02:05So he may have given the government a bit of a ledge off of that threat.
02:09But honestly, I expect the next six weeks in Israel,
02:13until he leaves office, to be extremely bumpy.
02:16Does this in any way ease the pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu?
02:25Prime Minister Netanyahu yesterday presented to the Supreme Court
02:31an affidavit in response to the claims made in Ronan Barr's affidavit.
02:38Both of these are sworn oaths.
02:40And both came accompanied with a thick wad of classified documents
02:45viewed only by the justices and not by the public.
02:49But Netanyahu's statement made yesterday, his affidavit,
02:53is a very problematic one in which it appears,
02:57the more one examines this document,
02:59that he misled the court, that he misquoted protocols,
03:05that he released biased and clipped or inaccurate versions
03:11of government discussions, of cabinet discussions,
03:14in which Ronan Barr participated.
03:17So on the one hand, yes, this could remove pressure from the prime minister
03:22because now he can tell his ministers and his political base,
03:25you see, I got rid of him, he's quitting.
03:28On the other hand, Netanyahu may have entangled himself
03:30in a real accusation of contempt of court
03:34or worse, of interfering in court proceedings
03:37with this very questionable document he presented yesterday.
03:42Nogatana Polsky, Jerusalem.
03:43As always, thank you very much, Jadid,
03:45for bringing us insight and analysis.
03:47Thank you, Mark.