Haaretz
                                                                                   
Friday, February 4, 2000
                            

Could he have been saved?
       
Did Yitzhak Rabin receive proper medical treatment at Ichilov Hospital
after he was shot on November 4, 1995? The Health Ministry has
launched a secret investigation into allegations that he did not

By Ronen Bergman

       
On November 4, 1995, following a peace rally, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin
was shot twice as he entered his car, parked outside the Tel Aviv
municipal building. He was bundled into the vehicle and rushed to nearby
Ichilov Hospital.  There, surrounded by doctors, he was pronounced
dead.The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin continues to haunt Israeli society
and to raise wrenching political and social questions. But there is
another aspect of the event that until now has been kept hidden from the
public.  It involves a dispute between senior surgeons, the details of
which are here revealed for the first time, revolving around the question
of whether the wounded prime minister received the best possible medical
treatment at Ichilov.  Were mistakes made in diagnosing his wounds? And
did someone try to whitewash the mistakes afterward?

The legal adviser of the Health Ministry recently undertook a secret
investigation into allegations about the quality of the treatment
Rabin got that night. At the same time, the Ethics Committee of the
Israel Medical Association (IMA), headed by Prof. Eran Dolev, is
looking into a series of complaints against senior physicians, on
suspicion that they wrongly tarnished the names of the surgeons who
treated Rabin at Ichilov. (See box)

Ha'aretz Magazine has obtained the medical records from that night, as
well as the findings of the post-mortem. On the basis of these
documents, leaving aside details whose revelation would constitute an
invasion of privacy, it is possible to reconstruct the events at
Ichilov Hospital on the night of November 4, 1995.  Jerusalem vs. Tel
Aviv A short time after the murder, Prof. Rivkind sent a letter to the
Shamgar Commission (the state commission of inquiry, chaired by
retired Supreme Court President Meir Shamgar, which investigated the
assassination) calling for an inquiry into the medical treatment
received by Rabin at Ichilov. Prof. Yoram Kluger is the director of
the trauma unit at Ichilov and the surgeon who operated on Rabin.  "It
started the very day after the assassination," Kluger says of the
criticism against him. "The whole team that was there that night, in
that operating theater, has been exposed to criticism by a number of
medical figures in Israel, who claim that he did not get proper
treatment."

Heading the list of the "medical figures" referred to by Kluger is
Prof. Avraham Rivkind, the head of the surgical ward and the former
director of the trauma unit at Hadassah Hospital in Ein Karem,
Jerusalem, who is considered one of Israel's leading trauma experts.

Prof. Yoel Donchin, a senior anesthesiologist at Hadassah and one of
the founders of the trauma unit both at the hospital and in the IDF
Medical Corps, also heard Rivkind say - in conversations held in the
corridor during a conference of the Israel Trauma Society held shortly
after the assassination - that he could have saved Rabin.  Rivkind
went on to list the mistakes he thinks were made at Ichilov.

Echoes of the criticism reached Kluger. "I have an Indian friend who
heard Rivkind talk about me and who told me that even in India,
Ichilov has acquired a bad reputation, as though we were the ones who
killed Rabin.  Some of the people I am talking about actually
approached the Shamgar Commission and claimed that things should have
been done differently. Along with extreme right-wingers and their
conspiracy theory, which claims there was a third bullet that struck
Rabin, some of our colleagues are disseminating wicked rumors about
us."

Prof. Rivkind's lawyer, Gilad Sher, stated: "Prof. Rivkind refused to
comment on the article or any part of it, and he dissociates himself
from the remarks he is alleged to have made. It is a pity that a
respectable media organ like Ha'aretz Magazine has been dragged into
publishing personal vilifications that lack any factual basis against
one of the best doctors in the country. Incidentally, it is to be
regretted that material has leaked from such a sensitive body as the
Shamgar Commission, as this is liable to dissuade the public from
cooperating with such commissions in the future."

Kluger has also heard criticism himself. "Because of what our
colleagues did to us, at every single lecture I deliver, including
talks to students from the United States who are doing in-service work
at Ichilov, someone invariably gets up at the end and says: 'Maybe you
would be willing to tell us the truth about what happened that night
in the operating theater.' Some time ago I delivered a lecture to law
students, and even there, away from the medical milieu, a few students
got up and said they wanted to resolve the problem, 'because the word
is that you screwed up.' Friends of mine from other hospitals come up
to me and say: 'Listen, Kluger, we're friends, but how come you
bungled it, why didn't you save Rabin?'"

For Kluger, however, "It's all nonsense. The man was dead when he got
to the emergency room and it was impossible to save him. Even if he
had been taken to Hadassah Ein Karem, and even if Rivkind had been on
duty in the emergency ward at the time, the result would have been the
same. Neither he nor anyone else in Israel could have succeeded. Since
Rivkind does not know exactly what happened in the emergency ward and
does not know the stages of the surgery, he is wrong. If he were a
true professional, he would have called me and asked exactly what
happened there. What did you do, why did you open the stomach first,
how much blood did Rabin get? But he doesn't want to hear any of
that. I want to tell you with all responsibility: I wouldn't let him
operate on my cat."

Chaos in the emergency ward Yitzhak Rabin was struck by two 9mm
bullets fired from Yigal Amir's Beretta pistol at 9:40 P.M., according
to a report in Ha'aretz - the hospital records contain no mention of
the exact time of the shooting. After the first shot, Rabin was still
able to turn his head and look behind him, and see Amir, whereupon he
was struck by a second shot before being knocked to the ground by
bodyguards in an effort to protect him. The wounded prime minister was
pushed into his car, which took off on a wild ride to Ichilov. Apart
from the driver, Menachem Damti, the only other person in the car with
Rabin was his bodyguard, Yoram Rubin, who had been lightly wounded.

On the way, Rabin lost consciousness and Rubin began resuscitating
him. According to the hospital records, Rabin arrived in the emergency
ward at 9:52 P.M. Ichilov had received no advance notice that a
wounded individual was on the way, still less that the individual in
question was the prime minister. For a few seconds the nurses did not
identify him, until the bleeding Rubin shouted that it was Yitzhak
Rabin. Dr.  Mordechai Guttman, deputy director of Surgery 2, was a
duty physician that night, and immediately after Rabin was pronounced
dead, he wrote the first record of the treatment the prime minister
had received.

Guttman wrote: "Aged 73, arrived in emergency in a passenger car after
being shot at close range. Upon admission: unconscious. Agonal gasping
[breathing associated with the death agony].  Peripheral pulse
[measured at the root of the palm] and blood pressure not amenable to
measurement. Chest - entry wound in the area of the right shoulder,
reduced entry of air to right lung. Normal ventilation in the left
[lung]. Stomach - entry wound in left hip. Active bleeding from the
wound. Monitor: no pulse recorded.

"Action: endotracheal intubation [introduction of a tube into the
trachea], ventilation. Two units of blood were transfused via
peripheral IV lines; upon insertion of the right chest drain, air
under pressure followed by blood. Appearance of pulse rate, 130 per
minute, peripheral pulse felt. At this stage [after about eight
minutes] patient is rushed to the operating theater."

A close perusal of the Ichilov documents shows inexplicable
contradictions between Dr.  Guttman's first entry in the log book and
subsequent records. Thus, for example, the final report, which is the
only one in the file that is machine-printed, and bears the title
"Yitzhak Rabin - Summation of Clinical Procedure," states that the
peripheral pulse was not taken, but that the central pulse (measured
in the heart) was measured. According to the final report, the pulse
rate as measured by the monitor was 120, and not 130 as Guttman
wrote. Nor is it clear how Dr.  Guttman could have found normal
ventilation in the left lung before he began resuscitating a person
who was described by the doctors as dead on arrival at the hospital.

Prof. Kluger provided a totally different clinical description in his
testimony at the trial of Yigal Amir (page 99 of the court record): "I
was in the hospital when the prime minister arrived together with a
bodyguard.  When the prime minister arrived at the hospital, with no
blood pressure, no pulse and displaying agonal respiration, the final
breaths of a human being, I treated him." That is simply
incorrect. Kluger was at home when Rabin arrived at the hospital. He
received a call on his beeper to call the emergency ward urgently, and
was told: "Get here right away. Rabin was shot. He is in the shock
room." Kluger left for the hospital immediately, but by the time he
got there Rabin was already on the operating table and Dr.  Guttman
had already begun surgery.

The criticism by Rivkind and others of the attempts to resuscitate
Rabin begins at the stage in which Rabin was brought to the emergency
ward.  These critics maintain that in the first place, chest tubes
should have also been inserted into the other side of the chest cavity
to ensure proper drainage of blood and air.  Another criticism is that
Rabin's chest cavity was not opened at that stage, in the emergency
ward. Kluger says: "I give Guttman full backing on that. A drain was
inserted that removed a little blood and a little air. So Guttman
understood that the problem lay elsewhere. Since the bullet entered
behind the stomach cavity, it was clear to Guttman that there was
bleeding in that region and that it had to be opened.

"True, some of my colleagues in Israel and abroad say we should have
opened the chest cavity already in the emergency ward, but if you look
at the chart of the timetable we have, it did not take more than 13
minutes to get Rabin down to the operating theater, where the
continuation of the work took place. One of Guttman's considerations
was that there were dozens of people in the emergency ward because of
the rumors. Guttman did not know who they were. He was afraid of them
and decided to continue the resuscitation in the operating theater."

Nonexistent wound After 8 minutes, according to one record, and 12
minutes according to another, Rabin was taken to the operating
theater. It was ready to receive patients because the hospital had
been placed on an emergency footing, for fear of a terrorist attack
during the peace rally at the end of which Rabin was shot. Because of
a certain visible physical sign displayed by Rabin, the doctors
decided that the prime minister was suffering from serious damage to
the spine.  That was incorrect. Rabin suffered no spinal damage. The
mistaken diagnosis also dictated part of the treatment he received,
which would turn out to be unnecessary and ineffective. To the
physicians' credit, it should be noted that the physical indication in
question usually does indicate damage to the spinal cord. In Rabin's
case, though, it was due to medical treatment he had received in the
past, which was unrelated to the spine and therefore was not caused by
the shattering of vertebrae.

Still, the understandable mistake cannot explain why Dr.  Guttman
wrote, at 11:30 P.M., in a document summing up the events, in his
handwriting: "Gunshot wound with puncture in the lung in upper lobe.
Exit wound in direction of 5-6D [referring to vertebrae numbers] with
shattering of the vertebra." Dr. Guttman was doubly wrong. First,
there was no exit wound on Rabin's body; Guttman mistakenly diagnosed
an entry wound made by one of the bullets as an exit wound.  Second,
none of the vertebrae were shattered. Here and in other records from
that night, it is difficult to understand what made Guttman think he
identified shattered fragments of the vertebra. An entry wound and an
exit wound in the back are commensurate with a theory of damage done
to the spinal cord: the trajectory of the entering bullet causes it to
strike the spinal cord, shatter it, and exit. But in this case, theory
and reality were at odds.

Shortly after midnight (it was now November 5), the director of the
hospital, Prof. Gabi Barabash, told Channel One anchor Haim Yavin in a
live interview that Rabin had died of "serious damage to the spine."
When the body was X-rayed during the autopsy, it turned out that the
spinal cord had not been touched. All the doctors who treated Rabin
were present at the autopsy, which was performed by Dr.  Yehuda Hiss,
the head of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir - though
Hiss for some reason omitted that fact from his report. Yet amazingly,
in the printout of the concluding report, which was prepared on the
day after the assassination and signed by Kluger, Guttman and Prof.
Yosef Klausner, the director of the surgical ward at Ichilov, there is
no mention of damage to the spine, even though it was cited so
prominently in all the documents that were drawn up in the immediate
aftermath of the shooting.

Prof. Kluger concedes the mistaken diagnosis but explains the context:
"The diagnosis of damage to the spine was a mistake, as was the
diagnosis of an exit wound and the shattering of the vertebra. But
what can we do, the medical team has only what it sees, and since we
did not have Rabin's medical history, that was the only conclusion
that could be drawn. When we opened the chest cavity we saw the
shattering of the rib in the area of its connection, and that accounts
for the fragments we saw. That area bled very seriously. That is why
the thought arose about damage to the vertebra, and that matched the
other bodily signs. I can't say that this brought about a substantial
change in the treatment Rabin received. There is nothing to do, it was
impossible to save him. From the outset, effectively, we were treating
a cadaver."

The mistaken diagnosis, attributing a certain bodily sign to a
nonexistent wound, also attests to the failure of the Shin Bet
internal security service in protecting the prime minister. If the
team of bodyguards and agents had included a doctor, for example a
trauma expert familiar with Rabin's medical history, he would have
been able to apprise the hospital personnel of their mistake
immediately, and it would not have taken the autopsy to disclose it.
And, of course, that doctor would have begun to treat Rabin
immediately after he was shot, saving precious minutes in which Rabin
was brought to the hospital in the car.

Since the assassination, and in the wake of the recommendations of the
Shamgar Commission, a doctor carrying resuscitation equipment always
accompanies the prime minister. This arrangement has already saved the
life of one person: on June 4, 1997, during an official ceremony, the
IDF's chief chaplain, Rabbi Gad Navon, suffered cardiac arrest and
collapsed.  The physician accompanying then prime minister Benjamin
Netanyahu used the equipment to save Navon's life.

Heroic resuscitation In addition to the mistaken diagnosis, the
medical team at Ichilov had problems identifying the paths taken by
the bullets within Rabin's body. None of the hospital records, for
example, mention that the left lung was struck, even though one of the
bullets (whether the first or the second remains unknown) entered the
lung and stopped there, causing serious damage and major bleeding. The
medical documents suggest that the hospital staff assumed that the
left lung was working normally. In his court testimony, Kluger
mentioned the two bullets and their exact trajectories, but that was
already after the autopsy.  Nevertheless, Kluger said in his
testimony: "The bullets were of the hollow point type.  We identified
them during the treatment, we removed them."  In fact, the bullets
were removed only a few hours later, in the course of the autopsy.

Kluger: "I knew in real time, as soon as I entered the operating
theater, where the first bullet was and where the second bullet was,
and I even felt one of them, which had lodged beneath the skin of the
chest cavity. I removed the bullet in the left lung during the autopsy
of Prof. Hiss. He asked me to do it because I know how to remove
bullets without harming the blood vessels."

Several emergency procedures were performed in the operating theater
in order to stanch the heavy bleeding. In the course of the treatment
Rabin received 21 units of whole blood. For a time, the doctors were
able to stop the bleeding in the abdomen. A pulse of 100-130 was
measured, and for a few minutes Rabin's blood pressure rose to 90.
Kluger: "At that stage, someone left the operating theater. I don't
know who it was because the room was full of Shin Bet personnel. It is
possible that one of them, or maybe [hospital director] Barabash
himself went to the family and, without our concurrence, told them
that there was a chance, because the blood pressure was rising.  We
knew the whole time that there was no chance, and I am sorry that
statement was made."

Prof. Yoel Donchin, from Hadassah Hospital, went over all the medical
documents from the Rabin file. "I heard Rivkind say that he could have
saved Rabin and that the staff at Ichilov didn't know their job,"
Donchin says. "Already when he said that at a conference of senior
surgeons, I told him, 'Avi, drop it, no one could have saved him.'
"[He] wasn't convinced. Now especially, after reading all the papers,
I can say in the most unequivocal manner: Rabin was dead when he
arrived at the emergency ward. If it had been an ordinary person, the
resuscitation that was performed would have been far shorter and he
would have been pronounced dead significantly sooner than in this
case.  Because it was Rabin, they performed what I call heroic
resuscitation."

Donchin explains that he himself has had several similar experiences
with soldiers: "During training or on the battlefield, a dying or dead
soldier would arrive. It was clear that there was no possibility of
saving him, but for the sake of the good feeling of his comrades who
were observing me, I performed all the resuscitation
procedures. Unfortunately, I was never favorably surprised.  The
percentage of success in these cases is absolute zero.  Rabin received
the best treatment possible. Yoram Kluger is a friend of mine and I
know his professional qualifications. If someone were to shoot me, I
would be very happy if Prof. Kluger treated me."

Prof. Rivkind's major objection to the treatment Rabin received that
night is that the chest was opened too late, and that if this had been
done at the outset, the serious damage to the lungs would have been
discovered.  The surgeons in the operating theater decided to open the
chest because they thought one of the bullets had passed through the
heart. Beyond this, there is a medical debate over whether a central
or a lateral incision should have been made. In any event, it turned
out in retrospect that one of the bullets only passed next to the
heart without causing any serious damage to that organ.

Yakirevich's secret Also in the operating theater that night was
Dr. Vladimir Yakirevich, then the director of the cardiac surgery
department at Ichilov, who got into a vociferous argument with the
other physicians.  Yakirevich demanded that a pacer be attached to
Rabin's heart and that various other procedures be undertaken as well
- with which the others disagreed. Yakirevich did not sign the
printout of the final report, which was signed by all the other senior
physicians who were present at the surgical procedure. Since the
assassination, Yakirevich has been heard to say on a number of
occasions that the treatment Rabin received was highly deficient and
that he has a belly-full of material on the subject. (In the meantime,
Yakirevich has been suspended by Ichilov and has been charged with a
series of suspected infractions related to his work there.) This week
he listened patiently to questions put by Ha'aretz, did not deny that
he has a lot of information about the Rabin case, and referred me to
his lawyer, retired judge Shaul Aloni.

Aloni stated: "I believe the subject of the medical treatment Rabin
received is of great public importance, but I will not permit my
client to give an interview, as that subject is indirectly related to
his trial."

Someone else who showed interest in the information Yakirevich claims
to have is Miriam Hibner, the legal adviser of the Health
Ministry. She sent Yakirevich a strongly worded letter in November
1999, demanding that he transfer "the said medical information you
have in your possession within 48 hours of receiving this letter."
Hibner wrote to attorney Aloni that if there was any basis to the
rumors that Yakirevich had reservations about the treatment Rabin
received, "there is certainly no legal obstacle to bringing these
objections to the attention of the Ministry of Health, which is
responsible for clarifying complaints about medical negligence ... If
your client saw fit to share these complaints with his professional
colleagues, it seems to me that making them available for an orderly
clarification by the Health Ministry would be even more in order."

Yakirevich did not respond to these entreaties. The Health Ministry
let it be known this week that since its requests went unanswered, it
has reached the conclusion that Yakirevich has nothing to say.
According to what attorney Aloni said, it can be inferred that since
these matters are "indirectly" related to his client's trial, that is
the platform from which Yakirevich has chosen to voice them.  Senior
officials in the Health Ministry say that Hibner's examination is
still proceeding and that she has talked about the treatment Rabin
received with other relevant officials.

Prof. Kluger: "Yakirevich arrived when we - all the senior doctors -
decided that there was nothing to be done.  He showed total ignorance
and proposed all kinds of weird ideas that are never done in trauma
procedures. Then came his whole campaign of abuse against Ichilov,
including the Rabin story."

Asked whether Rabin could have been saved if the shooting had occurred
next to Ichilov Hospital, Kluger said: "The description of events
given by Rabin's chauffeur, to the effect that he got to the hospital
within two minutes, was inexact... The truth is that 10 minutes or
even more elapsed from the moment of the wound until [he got to] us.
During that time, as became clear from a post-mortem brain tomography
[a method of producing a three-dimensional image of the internal
structure of a solid object], air had already entered the bloodstream
and from there to the brain. That is a death sentence. If you don't
deal with the air immediately, there is no chance. That has to be done
right after the wound is inflicted, based on a correct diagnosis and
on the operating table. That was not what happened in this case."

The possibility, however, does exist that air entered the brain at a
later stage.  Advanced studies in forensic medicine have proved that
in almost every cadaver the entry of air into the brain, usually after
death, has been found.  The autopsy report of Dr. Hiss does not in
fact specify this phenomenon as the cause of death, but rather
"serious damage to the lungs and spleen."

Fear of insurrection After attempts to revive him had gone on for
about 40 minutes, Rabin was pronounced dead. As described in the
Ichilov report:

"Suddenly the pulse slowed to 30 beats a minute and following this,
ventricular fibrillation (VF) appeared on the monitor, following by
cardiac standstill. Open heart massage was performed, adrenalin was
injected directly into the heart, followed by electrical shock,
without any reaction. After about 40 minutes of continued
resuscitation he was pronounced dead."

Kluger says that "after long minutes of resuscitation I decided, in
consultation with Guttman and Klausner, that there was no point to
continuing. There was no pulse, the pupils were dilated, there was no
sign of recovery. The prospect of continuing the heart massage and
getting a positive result was negligible. We decided out of respect
for Rabin to stop the resuscitation, That was the end of the story."

A short time after Rabin was pronounced dead, Prof. Hiss received a
phone call at his home from the Shin Bet, informing him that an
autopsy would soon be performed on the body. Hiss went to the
Institute of Forensic Medicine, where some of his staff were already
waiting, having heard heard the terrible news and assuming they would
have a lot of work that night. Then a senior official of the Shin Bet
called the institute and ordered Hiss to come to Ichilov to perform
the autopsy there. Hiss objected, saying the hospital did not have all
the required medical equipment and that there was no precedent for
such a request.  The Shin Bet official told Hiss that the secret
service feared that the shooting was the first act in a general
conspiracy to overthrow the government, and that the conspirators
would also try to abduct Rabin's body if it were moved. We will not be
able to safeguard the transfer of the body properly, the Shin Bet man
told Hiss, or to post guards in time around Abu Kabir. Ichilov is
already protected, so come here, the secret service man said.

Hiss went to Ichilov. Outside the operating theater he encountered
several dozen Shin Bet officials, agents of the Mossad espionage
organization and cabinet ministers, nearly all of them sitting
dumbfounded and weeping bitterly. Rabin's body was moved to a side
room that was then locked and guarded by two Shin Bet men armed with
mini-Uzi submachine guns.  According to a report Hiss later gave in a
closed forum, and contrary to what Prof.  Kluger said, the doctors
told him they did not know where the bullets were and said they might
be outside the body.  Hiss says he insisted on an X-ray, which showed
the bullets lodged in the two lungs.

Hiss began the autopsy at 2 A.M. and concluded it about three hours
later. Out of respect for the dead prime minister, Hiss (who declined
to be interviewed for this article) did not perform a general
post-mortem, but focused instead on determining the cause of death. To
forestall conspiracy theories or rumors regarding possible poisoning
or injury to the brain, however, he ordered a computerized tomography
of the brain, which showed no damage by a bullet or any other
object. All in all, it was quite a simple autopsy, during which the
two bullets were removed. Some time later, Hiss commented on Rabin's
excellent state of health - despite the many rumors about the prime
minister's heavy drinking, no trace of such a phenomenon was found in
the autopsy.  Bad blood Prof. Kluger maintains that the real reason
for Prof.  Rivkind's campaign against him is personal rivalry. Kluger
says that when he worked at Hadassah, Rivkind treated him badly. "When
he [Rivkind] started the trauma division at Hadassah, I raised him
from a level of zero to the level of a well-known person, and then he
gave me a slap in the face... I have absolutely no respect for him. He
knows that, and now he has found a golden opportunity to get back at
me."

For Kluger, the events of that night are "like dandruff that you can't
get rid of, because there is always more. Not a week goes by that I
don't get a phone call asking 'why you screwed up.' The time has come
to put a stop to this. No one can tell me about the meaning of
professionalism. Put Rivkind up against me, or anyone else who has
allegations against the treatment Rabin received. I will prove that
they are arrogant and overbearing and that there is no foundation to
what they say. For every expert they bring, I will bring 10 others."

Prof. Avraham Rivkind: "I have a very solid opinion about what
happened there that night, but I will not say what it is. In my
opinion, you will not find one doctor in Israel who will dare to tell
the truth about the treatment Rabin got."  Vested interests According
to Prof. Eran Dolev, the head of the Israel Medical Association's
Ethics Committee, "There has recently been another wave of anonymous
letters to the heads of the health system in Israel concerning the
medical treatment received by the late Yitzhak Rabin. This is the
third or fourth wave of letters, and it is never a chance matter - it
follows a competition on the part of some of those who were involved
in the treatment for some position [in the health system]. I have been
approached by both Prof.  Barabash and Prof. Klausner from Ichilov,
who asked for the committee's intervention in this matter.

"Unfortunately, it is very difficult for us to deal with these
requests, as we have a pretty good idea of who wrote the letters - but
nevertheless they were anonymous, and we are not a police force. I
have consulted with Prof. Herbert Freund, the chairman of the Surgeons
Association, and together we are considering how we might proceed.

"My principal criticism is that none of those who are leveling
criticism of the treatment and diagnosis has ever approached the
authorized bodies to demand an investigation. I could conclude such an
examination within a few days. We are talking about a specific matter
for which documentation exists. It would be possible to hear both
sides and to decide what should and could have been done on that
tragic night."  Ichilov: 'No medical negligence' Ichilov Hospital
spokeswoman Aviva Shemer said: "The members of the team that treated
the late Mr. Rabin are being attacked and vilified by their so-called
colleagues, who purport to have an understanding of what went on and
to be familiar with all the details of the event, even though it has
not been made public or subjected to discussion, and without their
having been given the opportunity to respond to the vilifications in
the appropriate forums, in recognized medical circles.

"Immediately after the event, the hospital made available all the
information, both open and classified, to officials of the Health
Ministry, the then health minister Ephraim Sneh, and the Shamgar
Commission. The hospital is convinced that it acted properly and
according to the accepted standards. The treatment received by the
prime minister was medicine at its finest. There was no medical
negligence, unnecessary delay or mistaken judgment. It is strange that
the doctors who have concocted their defamation scheme for four years
waited for such a lengthy period - apparently in the hope that the
dedicated and skilled medical team that treated the late Mr. Rabin
would find it difficult, due to the passage of time, to put forward
supportive material in order to refute the libel."