Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu was discharged from the Tel ha-Shomer hospital in Tel Aviv 24 hours after the hospitalization made necessary after the alleged illness and the fall at home in Cesarea which occurred on Saturday 15 July. The 73-year-old Likud leader spent the night in the cardiology department of the Sheba medical centre, where he underwent various tests and tests, none of which revealed worrying results. However, the doctors at the facility have decided to implant a device in Netanyahu’s heart to monitor his health more closely in the future. “Our diagnosis, at the end of all the tests carried out, including laboratory ones, is that the reason for hospitalization was dehydration,” the hospital said, confirming what the premier himself anticipated yesterday in a video. His heart function is “completely normal,” the doctors added.
The fall at home and the doubts of the press
The 73-year-old prime minister had lost consciousness yesterday at his home in Caesarea, slipping to the ground and hitting his head: for this he had been taken to hospital, news that had disturbed Israel for a few hours, even though it arrived on the day of rest of Shabbat. A few hours later, after the first reassurances given by his staff, it was Netanyahu himself who reconstructed what happened in a video message from the hospital: «Yesterday (Friday, ndr) I was with my wife at the seaside in Galilee: we were in the sun, without hats and without water… Not a good idea», the premier had said, then admonishing his fellow citizens paternally: «You don’t do like me!». But there are some doubts in the Israeli media about the fact that simple dehydration made the premier’s hospitalization necessary, as well as about the management of communication of what happened. “I don’t know exactly what happened to the prime minister, but the symptoms of dehydration appear quite quickly and are hardly visible 24 hours later,” he told the newspaper. Marariv the neurologist Rafi Carasso, adding that «if I see a patient hospitalized for dehydration and hard hours have already passed (since the incident, ndr) I expect it to be hooked up to an infusion machine.’ Yet the official version of Netanyahu’s hospitalization refers only to dehydration. According to the channel Able tothen, both in the political and in the medical world, there is unease about the lack of transparency in the communication of Netanyahu’s health problems. The information was in fact rigidly centralized and provided by the hospital, in a few terse communications, in concert with the prime minister’s office. And neither in the information nor in the video of the premier himself has there ever been a reference to the illness he had at home. Netanyahu, however, should return to his regular activities tomorrow, leading – with just one day’s delay – the usual weekly government meeting that he chairs.