As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was sent to hospital again, this time for a heart procedure, hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets again to protest his judicial overhaul plan.
This Sunday, and for the second time in a week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was sent to hospital for an emergency heart procedure to receive required treatment. a few hours later, however, he issued a statement and promised to press ahead with his controversial judicial overhaul plan.
Announcing Netanyahu’s hospitalization, his office said in a statement that the Prime Minister would be sedated and that a top deputy, Justice Minister Yariv Levin, would stand in for him while he underwent the procedure.
In a short video statement released Sunday night, Netanyahu himself said he had been fitted with a monitoring device after being briefly hospitalized last week, and that he felt excellent and planned to push forward with the judicial overhaul as soon as he was released. “I feel excellent, but I listen to my doctors,” he said in the video on Sunday.
Last week, he was hospitalized at Sheba hospital for what was described as dehydration. It also came after a tumultuous day that saw some of the largest protests to date against the judicial overhaul plan. Sunday nigh protests across Israel were no less massive and while Netanyahu was receiving treatment at the hospital, hundreds of thousands of Israeli people poured into the streets to demonstrate against it ahead of a key parliament vote that is expected to take place on this Monday.
How bad is Netanyahu’s health situation?
Although both Netanyahu and his office announced that the Prime Minister’s health situation is quite stable and there is nothing to be worried about, medical evidence of the kind of treatment Netanyahu received speaks the truth that he is not as well as he claims. To read between the line, a pacemaker, which Netanyahu received, is used only when a patient’s heart is beating too slower than normal.
According to the US National Institutes of Health, this kind of heart problem can very well cause fainting spells, and in a worst-case scenario, will even lead to a heart stroke because a is also used to treat heart failure. By sending electrical pulses to the heart, a pacemaker increases or maintains a person’s heartbeat at a normal rhythm, allowing the heart to do what it is unable to do, which is pump blood to the body at a normal rate.
How bad is Israel’s social and security situation?
While Netanyahu was at the heptitol, tens of thousands of protesters marched into Jerusalem and hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets in Tel Aviv and other cities to block Netanyahu’s contentious judicial overhaul plan. Over the past few months, Israel has been scene to countless massive protests that many experts believe would get even worse if the judicial overhaul plan is not stopped.
Also Saturday, more than 100 of Israel’s former security chiefs signed a letter pleading to halt the controversial legislation, and thousands of additional military reservists said they would no longer report for duty, in a protest against the plan.
The worrying news is that the far-right government has shown to be too stubborn to succumb to peoples’ will and still tries to implement the radical changes it intends to make in Israel’s judicial system, a clash between people and the state that is currently the biggest social and security challenge for the Israeli government which is only getting worse.
