Ehud Olmert released from hospital ahead of parole hearing

Former prime minister Ehud Olmert was released from Tel Hashomer hospital on Tuesday, a week after being admitted for chest pain, and returned to Ma’asiyahu Prison where he is serving a 27-month sentence.

A spokesperson for the hospital said that Olmert had been treated based on results of tests during his hospitalization and was released with instructions for further treatment.

The spokesperson refused to say what ailment had struck Olmert.

According to a report by Channel 10, Olmert experienced chest pain after exercising last week and was rushed to the hospital. The report said he had asked to see his personal doctor last week but was offered the prison doctor instead, which he refused.

The release comes two days before the Prisons Service parole board is slated to announce whether it will grant an early release for Olmert, following a hearing with the one-time premier and former mayor of Jerusalem.

After a picture of Olmert in a hospital gown, eating with plastic cutlery, surfaced on Friday, both Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon and Education Minister Naftali Bennett said that it was time for him to be released from prison.

“Like all the people of Israel, I saw the picture of Ehud Olmert in the hospital and I was shocked,” Kahlon tweeted on Sunday. “Olmert was tried and served his proper sentence and should not be humiliated or degraded beyond that. Nobody questions his … many years of tremendous contribution to the security of Israel. The time has come to release Ehud Olmert to his family.”

Bennett told the Ynet news site on Sunday that it was time for Olmert to be released.

“This is a person who, with all the political differences between us, has certainly made a very deep contribution to the security of the country … when he served as prime minister,” he said.

Olmert’s parole hearing comes soon after the State Prosecutor’s Office asked police to open a criminal investigation into Olmert over his alleged divulging of sensitive information in memoirs he is writing.

It said the book Olmert is writing contains “sensitive security issues” and that his lawyer was caught leaving the prison with a chapter on “secret operations” not approved by the censor for publication.

Police searched the publishing house of the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, but not the paper itself, over the incident.

Olmert was one of eight former officials and businessmen convicted in March 2014 in the Holyland real estate corruption case, which has been characterized as among the largest graft cases in Israel’s history.

In September 2016, he was sentenced to an additional eight months behind bars for the so-called Talansky affair. In that case, a court upheld a 2015 conviction over his accepting envelopes full of cash from American businessman and fundraiser Morris Talansky, in exchange for political favors during his decade-long term as mayor from 1993 to 2003.

The Prisons Service refitted a wing in the Ma’asiyahu Prison in Ramle to house Olmert, the first former premier to serve jail time, keeping him in a separate complex shared only by carefully screened fellow convicts.