Head of Jerusalem's Hadassah hospital hospitalized after 'small stroke'

Statement says Zeev Rotstein was under stress due to pandemic and financial crisis facing the hospital, but will return to work within days

The CEO of the Hadassah Medical Organization, Prof. Zeev Rotstein, was hospitalized on Friday after “a small stroke,” the hospital said in a statement Sunday.

“No doubt the past few weeks have been stressful,” the Jerusalem medical center said, announcing that Rotstein was being treated at Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan.

“Facing the state’s position on the need to regulate public hospital budgets was unbearable, especially in light of the activities of the hospital staff that fought the coronavirus epidemic. The short memory of state representatives is surprising,” the statement read.

Hadassah Medical Center has for years faced a financial crisis, which was exacerbated in recent weeks by the coronavirus pandemic.

The statement said that Rotstein will return to work in the coming days.

“As he himself has said: The road is still long and hard and it is not yet time to rest,” the statement concluded.

Rotstein was a fierce critic of the government’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak and earlier this year revealed, in an angry outburst at the Knesset, the tensions among health officials over the government’s coronavirus testing policy, criticized by some as inadequate, and saying that “the Health Ministry’s figures [on the number of tests perfomed] are not correct, to put it mildly.”

Rotstein demanded that the Health Ministry focus its testing on medical staff, a shift the ministry at the time resisted, citing a shortage of tests.

Health Ministry deputy director Itamar Grotto, who last week granted an Israeli-Cypriot billionaire’s request to be exempted from self-quarantine upon arrival in Israel, angrily rebuffed Rotstein’s criticism as “nonsense. My numbers are a hundred times more accurate than yours.”