Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered the dismissal of the head of the Shin Bet internal security service – a move temporarily blocked by the country’s top court.

Israel’s government voted in favour of Mr Netanyahu’s proposal to sack Ronen Bar – despite thousands protesting against it and criticising the prime minister’s handling of the hostage crisis.

But Mr Bar got a brief reprieve hours after the vote, as the Supreme Court said it was delaying the firing until an appeal could be heard no later than 8 April.

The prime minister’s office had said Mr Bar’s dismissal was effective from 10 April, but that it could come earlier if a replacement was found.

It would be the first time a head of Shin Bet has been sacked in Israel’s history.

Israel’s attorney general has ruled that the cabinet has no legal basis to dismiss Mr Bar.

The cabinet vote came as thousands protested outside Mr Netanyahu’s residence in Jerusalem on Thursday over his handling of the hostage situation and his plans to fire Mr Bar.

There were also protests calling for the release of hostages near his residence on Friday.

“Instead of firing the head of the Shin Bet, just to avoid an investigation, I think that the prime minister should be involved in rescuing the last hostages there are left in Gaza to die,” said Michal Halperin, a protester.

The prime minister is facing mounting pressure at home after resuming airstrikes in Gaza earlier this week, bringing an end to a fragile ceasefire with Hamas which had brought relative peace to the region for almost two months.

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Announcing his plans to sack Mr Bar, Mr Netanyahu said he had “ongoing distrust” in the head of Shin Bet.

Mr Bar, who has headed the agency since 2021, was until recently one of the senior negotiators for Israel with mediators in Egypt and Qatar.

He was replaced by Ron Dermer, strategic affairs minister and a close confidante of the prime minister’s, because Mr Netanyahu believed he was too soft in negotiations and leaked information to embarrass the government.

Mr Bar accepted responsibility for his failure to prevent the 7 October attacks and had already indicated he would step down once all the hostages were freed and a number of sensitive investigations were completed.

Five jihadists have been found guilty of holding French journalists captive in Syria for the terror group Islamic State.

One of the guilty, Mehdi Nemmouche, 39, has been described by the prosecution as “one of the most perverse and cruel jihadists of the past 10 years” with a “total absence of empathy and remorse.”

“Yes, I was a terrorist, and I will never apologise for it,” Nemmouche told the court in France hours before the verdict was due, while denying he held the men captive.

“I don’t regret a day, an hour, or an act,” he added.

Nemmouche was sentenced to life in prison, and will serve a minimum of 22 years behind bars. Abdelmalek Tanem was given 22 years and Kais Al Abdullah was sentenced to 20 years.

Meanwhile, Oussama Atar and Salim Benghalem, who are both referred to as integral figures in the Islamic State‘s operations and believed to be dead were sentenced to life in absentia.

The trial in Paris heard that journalists Didier Francois, Edouard Elias, Nicolas Henin, and Pierre Torres were terrorised during their 10 months in captivity between June 2013 and April 2014.

The four spoke of relentless physical and psychological torture at the hands of ISIS.

During their imprisonment, they were forced to watch the executions of other captives and endure beatings while surrounded by the screams of fellow detainees.

Nicolas Henin was snatched in the Syrian city of Raqqa with photographer Pierre Torres in 2013.

He told Sky News he was just “taken off the streets”.

During his time in captivity, he met American journalist James Foley and British aid worker David Haines, both of whom were later murdered by the notorious British ISIS militants “the Beatles”.

“We were a total of 24. Nineteen men held in one cell and five women in another one…and the plan was to start everything with an execution,” he says.

He remembers the first person executed on the day they arrived was a Russian man, but the murders would continue.

At times, their captors also carried out mock executions, dragging their terrified prisoners out for fake beheadings or leaving them in the boiling sun for hours during mock crucifixions.

“All our captors treated us badly. It is not only about beatings or torture; to keep someone captured in the dark sometimes blindfolded is enough,” Mr Henin said.

Throughout the trial, Nemmouche has always denied being their jailer, but the four former hostages recognised him.

Edouard Elias said he remembers him tormenting them for hours with constant chatter and singing French songs.

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Nicolas Henin will never forget his face or his manner.

“[He’s] sadistic, narcissistic, and I would say ‘gamer’ because for him nothing is serious. Everything is a game. He wants to win everything…he plays with the court,” he said.

Nemmouche is already serving a life sentence for the fatal attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels in May 2014.

He carried out the killings for ISIS a few weeks after the French journalists were released.

“This man, who fancies himself intelligent, is devoid of any human sentiment,” Prosecutor Benjamin Chambre said, describing him as a “real sociopath”.

It’s more than a decade since the journalists spent months witnessing and enduring the darkest and cruellest acts of humanity.

Asked how he managed to survive, Nicolas Henin paid tribute to his fellow hostages David Haines and James Foley who he says supported him mentally while he was detained.

Ahead of the verdict, he called for sentences that reflected the gravity of the crimes inflicted on them.

And what of the men who seemingly take joy in inflicting such pain and suffering – are they evil?

That’s what they need us to believe, he explains.

“It’s part of the game of terrorists to terrorise people. They need us to believe that they are not human.

“We have to look for the humanity still in them to prevent ourselves being totally petrified by fear facing them,” Mr Henin adds, refusing to be cowed.

“I prevent myself from feeling any hatred against them as much as any fear,” he says.

The incoming IOC president has revealed to Sky News she is against banning countries from the Olympics over wars and will open talks on Russia’s potential return to the Games.

Only Russians competing as neutrals were allowed to take part in Paris 2024 as Moscow was punished for launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Kirsty Coventry will be the first female president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and its first African leader.

The former Olympic swimmer, who won two gold medals for Zimbabwe, has said she sees inconsistencies in the current approach of singling out Russia while there are conflicts on her own continent.

Asked a day after her election if she was against banning countries from the Olympics over conflicts, Ms Coventry told Sky News: “I am, but I think you have to take each situation into account.

“What I would like to do is set up a taskforce where this taskforce tries to set out some policies and some guiding frameworks that we as the movement can use to make decisions when we are brought into conflicts.

“We have conflicts in Africa and they’re horrific at the moment. So this is not going away, sadly.

“So how are we going to protect and support athletes?

“How are we going to ensure that all athletes have the opportunity to come to the Olympic Games?

“And our responsibility is also to ensure once those athletes are all there, that they’re safe and that we protect and support them during the Olympic Games.

“So there’s a fine balance. But ultimately I believe that it’s best for our movement to ensure that we have all athletes represented.”

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US President Donald Trump has also apparently discussed with Russian leader Vladimir Putin the idea of using sports to heal relations with Russia.

While the next Summer Olympics are not until 2028 in Los Angeles, there are fewer than 11 months until the Winter Games in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo.

So will Russia be back by then?

“We’re going to have that discussion with a collective group …with the taskforce,” she said.

Gender eligibility

This interview was taking place a day after her election to the highest job in sport – seeing off six rivals, including Sebastian Coe.

World Athletics – led by Lord Coe – has been exploring whether to introduce swab tests to assess gender eligibility.

A key athletics meeting next week is due to discuss the issue amid concerns about fairness over athletes with differences of sex development and transgender women competing in women’s sport.

The IOC has previously called a return to sex testing a “bad idea”, but Ms Coventry is not ruling it out as she has talked about protecting the female category.

“This is a conversation that’s happened and the international federations have taken a far greater lead in this conversation,” she said.

“What I was proposing is to bring a group together with the international federations and really understand each sport is slightly different.

“We know in equestrian, sex is really not an issue, but in other sports it is.

“So what I’d like to do again is bring the international federations together and sit down and try and come up with a collective way forward for all of us to move.”

Future Olympic hosts

Looking ahead there are the 2036 Olympics to be awarded.

And Ms Coventry pledged IOC members will get more of a say after behind-the-scenes deals under Thomas Bach seeing Paris (2024), LA (2028) and Brisbane (2034) uncontested decisions.

The IOC presidential campaign has raised when Africa and the Middle East will host the Olympics for the first time, as well as potential interest from India to host the Games in 2036.

“There’s a few slight adjustments that I’d like to make in terms of involvement of the IOC members – that was something very clearly related to me in this campaign,” Ms Coventry said.

“But new regions and embracing new regions … will be a part of what I would like to see.

“I think if we can embrace new regions across the entire movement, it opens this up for so many different opportunities, including revenue growth, including being able to reach new audiences.”

Zimbabwe rights concerns

There has been scrutiny over Ms Coventry’s role in Zimbabwe’s government as sports minister given concerns – raised by the UK government – about whether the country is violating human rights and clamping down on political freedoms.

“I have always been a very proud Zimbabwean and when I was asked to step into this role (as a minister in 2018), I took time to really consider it,” she said.

“I knew that it would come with different thoughts and feelings, but I wanted to try and create change in my country. I wanted to try and make things better for athletes in my country and we’re doing that.

“We’re working on strengthening pieces of legislation that have never been there before. And these are things that I don’t believe I would have been able to achieve on the outside.”

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IOC agenda

Ms Coventry officially starts in June as the first female IOC president.

“It shows that we are moving and we’re changing and we’re global and we’re diverse and we represent everybody,” she said.

And how will her presidency be judged a success? The rules allow her to serve until 2037 if she is re-elected for a final four-year term after being given an initial eight-year mandate.

She said: “I want to ensure that we can find these young, talented athletes from around the world and we can give them an opportunity to be identified and to have training and be connected to the best coaches in the world and that’s all going to be driven by embracing technology.

“And I think that is going to be really a game changer in the next few years.”