ISRAELI NEWSPAPER CLAIMS FIRST LEGAL EUTHANASIA IN ISRAEL

JERUSALEM, Dec 4 (LSN)  Itai Arad, 49, died Oct. 5 at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital, one day after being disconnected from life support. Arad, who had Lou Gehrig’s disease, won a court case in 1996 when Tel Aviv District Court Judge Moshe Talgam ruled in a landmark decision that Arad had the right to choose the time of his death.  After hospital staff at one hospital refused his request to end life support, Arad was moved to Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital where Dr. Avinoam Reches, agreed to disconnect Arad from life support with the approval of the hospital’s ethics committee. The committee asked the courts to corroborate their decision and was given the go ahead on October 1st.  On Wednesday, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper described Arad’s death as “Israel’s first official euthanasia.”  Israeli politician Yitzhak Cohen from the Shas Party reacted swiftly submitting a bill to parliament to prevent doctors from disconnecting life support. “Even if a person is sick, even if he is dying, even if he is crippled or mentally backward, nobody has the right to take his life, neither by commission nor by omission,” Cohen said.