From the Liveblog of
Thursday, November 2, 2023
National Unity, Joint List MKs clash during visit to Hadassah hospital
Renee Ghert-Zand is the health reporter and a feature writer for The Times of Israel.
A Knesset Health Committee visit to Hadassah Medical Center’s Mt. Scopus hospital today devolved into a screaming match between two committee members.
The committee was hosted by senior Hadassah leadership, who gave the MKs a tour of the hospital’s new rehabilitation center under construction.
An ensuing discussion focused mainly on growing and unmet needs in rehab medicine countrywide, particularly in Jerusalem and periphery regions.
Amid talk of governmental budgets and compliments for medical staff of all backgrounds working together to save lives under challenging wartime conditions, an off-topic argument broke out between National Unity MK Penina Tamano-Shata and Joint List MK Ahmad Tibi.
Tamano-Shata lashed out at Tibi, accusing him of not attending a special Knesset screening yesterday of uncensored footage recorded by Hamas terrorists as they committed unspeakable acts of violence on innocent Israelis on October 7. The footage was so horrific that some MKs could not bear to stay in the screening until the end.
A fuming Tibi shouted that he had seen the footage, though not at yesterday’s screening. Tamano-Shata refused to listen to Tibi and continued to yell at him, with Tibi screaming back at her. The two made their claims and counterclaims a handful of times, with the volume so high that it was hard to understand what they were each saying.
Toward the end of the explosive argument, Tamano-Shata accused Tibi of saying in 2018 that Hamas was not a terror organization. Tibi replied that she was misquoting him and taking his remarks out of context.
