Four years after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin,
an angry debate that until now has occupied Israel's leading medical
establishment since the night of the murder has flared up in public. According
to a report in Ha'aretz, the question at hand: Did the prime
minister receive the best possible treatment in Ichilov Hospital's
trauma room after being shot at the end of a peace rally?
The legal adviser of the Health Ministry, Miriam Hibner, has recently
undertaken an examination of allegations and anonymous letters regarding
alleged mistakes made in the treatment administered to Rabin on the
night of November 4, 1995.
Among others, she has approached Ichilov director, Professor Gabi
Barabash; Dr. Vladimir Yakirevich, who was present in the operation
theater and criticized the treatment given to Rabin; and Dr. Yehuda
Hiss, head of the Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic Medicine who later
performed the autopsy on Rabin's body.
At the same time, the Ethics Committee of the Israel Medical Association,
headed by Professor Eran Dolev, is looking into a series of complaints
made by the heads of Ichilov against senior physicians for wrongly
tarnishing the reputations of the surgeons who treated Rabin at Ichilov.
"This is the third or fourth wave of letters, and it is never
a chance matter," Professor Dolev said. "It follows a competition
on the part of some of those who were involved in the treatment for
some position [in the health system]."
"This is war. There is no other way to define it," says a
very senior official in Israel's medical establishment.
"In the last four years the murder of Rabin has been the hottest
debate at any gathering of ours. At the background is an old and very
bitter rivalry between the trauma and surgery units of Hadassah and
Ichilov."
The debate first erupted shortly after Rabin's murder. Director of
the trauma unit at Jerusalem's Hadassah Ein Karem Hospital, Professor
Avraham Rivkind, considered one of Israel's leading trauma experts,
sent a letter to the Shamgar Commission investigating the assassination.
In the letter he called for an inquiry into the medical treatment
received by Rabin at Ichilov.
"It started the very day after the assassination," says Professor
Yoram Kluger, then director of the trauma unit at Ichilov and the
surgeon who operated on Rabin.
Dr. Yakirevich, then the director of the cardiac surgery department
at Ichilov, was present in the operating theater on the night of the
murder and got into a vociferous argument with the other physicians.
Dr. Yakirevich demanded that a pacemaker be attached to Rabin's heart
and that various other procedures be undertaken as well--with which
the others disagreed. He did not sign the printout of the final report,
which was signed by all the other senior physicians present at the
surgical procedure.
Since the assassination, Dr. Yakirevich has been heard saying on a
number of occasions that the treatment Rabin received was highly deficient
and that he has a lot of material on the subject.
In the meantime, Dr. Yakirevich has been suspended by Ichilov and
has been charged with a series of suspected infractions related to
his work at the hospital.
He did not deny that he has a lot of information about the Rabin case,
and referred Ha'aretz 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."
The Health Ministry said it found no evidence that Israeli Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin received inadequate medical treatment after
he was gunned down by an assassin at a Tel Aviv peace rally in 1995.
The Health Ministry looked into the matter, said ministry spokesman
Yoram Malka.
He said Yakirevich failed to turn over the alleged information, leading
ministry officials to conclude there was no need for a further inquiry.
"There was no negligence. There is no problem from our point of
view," Malka said.
