The Health Ministry has established a 24/7 hotline where employees can report cases of defamation and intimidation, following a series of violent threats against senior officials and others, including Head of Public Health Services Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis.
“The Health Ministry is working in close cooperation with the Israel Police,” it said in a statement Saturday night, “and all the threats reported against the ministry’s employees as a whole are being examined and treated in accordance with the assessments of the situations.”
The hotline, which is operating under the Health Ministry’s National Security Department, was set up earlier in the month and employees of the health system were informed of it on October 19 via a letter from Health Ministry Director-General Prof. Nachman Ash, which was released to the public Saturday night.
The Health Ministry also announced that Alroy-Preis had been assigned a bodyguard, following serious threats on her life by anti-vaxxers.
Last week, her husband, Dr. Meir Preis, took to Twitter to express his fear over the situation, tagging the police and Public Security Minister Omer Bar Lev.
“There are concrete threats to the life of my wife,” he wrote. “You know that, there are messages on social networks, there are phone numbers, there are explicitly threatening calls. You have the materials. It is time to act, now before it’s too late!”
The Health Ministry said that in addition to the bodyguard, the Preis home had been equipped with a distress button and reinforced by other security activities for months.
“We have recently witnessed extreme statements toward healthcare workers,” Ash wrote in his letter, “coming from opponents of the actions being taken by the state to eradicate the coronavirus, most prominently from vaccine opponents.”
He said there have been clashes on social networks, including personal attacks characterized by blatant criticism and abusive images.
Ash said that sometimes the criticism crosses the threshold of “legitimate discussion and may impair the resilience of the system’s workers.”
Alroy-Preis has been the target of insults for months. According to reports in Israeli media, the threats against her had already been considered at level four out of six, hence the reason for the police patrols and other efforts.
Rossella Tercatin contributed to this report.