The Knesset member Idit Silman announced on Sunday that she had no intention of returning to her place in the government, thus leaving the legislature split evenly between those who are part of the ruling coalition—led by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid—and those who are in the opposition. After seeking to explain the motivations behind Silman’s defection, Haviv Rettig Gur details the likely consequences:

The political system has entered—or re-entered—a period of uncertainty. But one thing is not uncertain. The current government, if it survives, will be unable to muster parliamentary majorities for any significant initiative. Reforms or major budgetary decisions are all frozen now. The paralysis of 2019-2021 is back.

Perhaps it was inevitable. . . . But there are real costs to that paralysis. . . . A major, urgently needed billion-shekel package of financial aid for small businesses hurt by pandemic closures hangs in the legislative balance, as does a new pension framework for the army, a minimum-wage increase, and tax breaks for working parents. The largest-ever transportation spending bill, a dramatic upgrade to the country’s rail networks, now sits on the Knesset docket waiting to move forward. A revised ḥaredi draft bill that would release more young ḥaredi men from their study obligations and allow them to join the workforce at a younger age will be frozen.

So it goes for a dozen more major initiatives, most of them supported as wholeheartedly by Likud as by Labor and [the hard-left] Meretz, but now headed for a political deep freeze.

Politics isn’t a sport. . . . It is, first and foremost, the management of the people’s business—and that business will once again not get done.

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.