| Submit your comments on this article | |
| Israel-Palestine-Jordan | |
| Israel's Peres leaves hospital after collapse | |
| 2009-09-14 | |
| [Al Arabiya Latest] Israeli President Shimon Peres was discharged from the hospital on Sunday with a clean bill of health, a day after the 86-year-old Nobel peace laureate passed out briefly at a ceremony. "I can say to everyone that we have a president who is dynamic, young at heart and physically healthy," said Dr. Zeev Rothstein, director of Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv where Peres was kept for observation overnight.
"He fainted for at most a dozen seconds before regaining consciousness and at first had refused to go to the hospital," his spokeswoman Ayelet Frisch told reporters. Peres's personal physician, Rafi Valdan, told the Ynet news website that the octogenarian was feeling fine after the incident. "It was simply very hot and he stood up for a long time and felt dizzy. He fainted for a few seconds," his personal physician, Rafi Valdan was quoted as telling the Ynet news website. Peres, whose role is ceremonial, was expected to resume much of his daily routine, including a planned meeting later on Sunday with U.S. President Barack Obama's Middle East peace envoy, George Mitchell, doctors and aides said. The Polish-born former prime minister is a veteran of Israeli left-of-centre politics, with a career going back to before the founding of the Jewish state in 1948. As foreign minister, along with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Peres won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 for reaching a series of ground-breaking interim accords. He was elected president by parliament in 2007. In that capacity, he has continued to speak out in the cause of peace with the Palestinians and other Arab neighbors, although his interim deal has yet to produce a final peace settlement. | |
| Posted by:Fred |