“Not every day does a person get to see the world after their own death — the death certificate, which letters are sent, and how institutions mobilize,” said Dafna Sagiv Reiss, 49. The sentence may sound absurd, but this is a real and almost unimaginable case.
About two months ago, Dafna was taken to Kaplan Medical Center, operated by Clalit Health Services, after a cardiac event. After her discharge, she discovered that the hospital had mistakenly updated its records to state that she had died. Since then, she has been caught in a bureaucratic nightmare involving numerous institutions: her bank account was frozen, credit cards and insurance policies were canceled, and she was even forced to obtain a new ID card.
“I’m a forgiving person by nature, but I’m going through a horrific experience. I’m after a heart attack, and my partner and I are working to try to bring me back to life in every system in Israel,” Dafna told ynet. “We received letters at home saying he could claim my money after my death, condolence letters expressing sympathy, and in early December I even received a formal death certificate. How much can you mess with a person? I’m a strong person, but there’s a limit.”
Dafna, a couples and sex therapist and an academic lecturer, describes herself as someone who maintains a healthy diet, exercises regularly and does not smoke. Still, in November she experienced an unusual medical episode. During an event in the community where she lives, she began feeling weakness and intense pressure in her chest, which worsened after she returned home. “I realized something was wrong. The nausea and pressure didn’t go away, and I asked my children to call MDA,” she said.
After speaking with MDA and consulting a friend who is a physician, Dafna decided to go on her own to the emergency room at Kaplan. “While my son was driving, I felt that my left shoulder, which had only been aching until then, became completely paralyzed,” she said.
Dafna Sagiv Reiss: “While I was lying on a couch in the corner of the emergency room, the doctor was filling out a death certificate for me. Apparently another woman had died from complications of pneumonia, and he entered my ID number into the records while I was sitting right next to him.”
According to her, despite arriving at the ER quickly, she encountered indifference from the attending physician, who claimed it was not a heart attack but a panic attack. “The doctor preferred to believe imaginary scenarios rather than real symptoms,” she said. She noted that only after six hours was it determined that she was in fact having a heart attack, and she was sent to the cardiac intensive care unit. “The number of mistakes the doctor made is extraordinary, because during an active heart attack I was forced to walk more than half a mile with my partner to get a chest X-ray inside the hospital,” she said.
Beyond what she describes as diagnostic chaos, and while she was waiting for the results of a second blood test, it emerged that the physician had confused her with another patient. “While I was lying on a couch in the corner of the ER, the doctor was filling out a death certificate for me,” Dafna said. “Apparently someone else had died from complications of pneumonia, and he entered my ID number and my personal details into the records, while I was sitting next to him.”
She discovered the grave error only days later, entirely by chance. “Two days after I was hospitalized, I tried to make a bank transfer and couldn’t log into the banking app,” she said. Her partner also tried to make the transfer without success. He noticed that the list of standing beneficiaries had been completely erased, leaving only an option to transfer money to an account labeled “Dafna, deceased.” “Of course he didn’t tell me right away so as not to stress me, but he immediately called the bank, where they said they had received notice of a death from the Interior Ministry and would look into it.”
From there, the situation only grew more complicated. At the end of that week, Dafna was discharged from the hospital. When her partner went to a pharmacy to buy her medications, the pharmacist stunned him by saying that Dafna did not exist in the system. “He put two and two together with what had happened at the bank and realized something serious had occurred,” she said.
While Dafna was still unaware of the scope of the incident, her partner went to the hospital and immediately reported the mistake. “From that point on, the hospital formally received notice of the case, but even today, more than two months later, we’re still dealing with it,” she said.
She explained that once the hospital transmitted the report to the Interior Ministry, notice of her “death” spread like wildfire to countless governmental and nongovernmental bodies, including some she had never dealt with. “A few days later I tried to get car insurance, and on their computer screen it said ‘death,’” she said.
Dafna added that the Interior Ministry claimed at the end of November that it had updated the records, but a few days later a formal death certificate arrived at her home. “It was a shock,” she said. She was later asked to physically return the certificate herself once officials realized a mistake had been made.
As of now, she still has not been able to reinstate various insurance policies registered in her name, nor her credit cards or related standing orders, and she is even struggling to receive routine medical care. “For weeks I’ve been scheduling follow-up appointments, including with a cardiologist, and every time I arrived at the clinic the appointment was canceled,” she said. “The last time, I asked the secretary what reason appeared in the system for the cancellation. She turned pale and said, ‘death.’ The mistake apparently stemmed from a malfunction in Kaplan’s system, which kept killing me anew every day.”
In the past week, she managed for the first time to attend one of her appointments, but she fears for the continuation of the medical follow-up and treatment she needs. Dafna added that her parents were also forced to deal with the situation after receiving a notice from the Justice Ministry stating that one of the signatories to their enduring power of attorney had died.
In recent weeks, several letters have been sent on Dafna’s behalf, through the law firm Dr. A. Rubinstein – S. Yakirevitch, to Kaplan Medical Center, to Clalit Health Services, which operates it, and to the Health and Interior ministries. “Only after a month and two days did Kaplan admit that a mistake had been made. They claim they fixed it, but in practice almost nothing has changed, and everything is moving at a snail’s pace,” Dafna said. “I have a feeling that until 2030, offices I never even thought to notify will still be chasing me.”
Harm and suffering instead of recovery
“This is simply insane. Someone really insisted on killing me in the records of the State of Israel. How was this not caught during my hospitalization? Isn’t there anyone else who checks the link between an ID number and a deceased person?” she said. “It’s impossible to describe the damage done to me. This was a registration error that severely harmed my quality of life — an error that broke my insurance continuity, canceled standing orders and credit cards and froze my bank account. There is an appalling waste of time, anger and frustration when systems fail to fix the situation, a waste of resources and most importantly, all of this instead of resting and recovering from my medical condition. How can they put me through such suffering for no fault of my own?”
Attorneys Dr. Avi Rubinstein, Shmuel Yakirevitch and Itai Naor Zabari, who represent Dafna, said: “It takes only the thoughtlessness of one employee to erase a living person from the state’s systems. Particularly serious is the absence of a control mechanism that would prevent an erroneous death registration from spreading beyond the medical institution, when even while Dafna was hospitalized — and the hospitalization continued after the incorrect entry — no alert was triggered.”
They said the handling of the failure is no less severe. “Only after a month and two days did Dafna receive a general notice of error that was not an official letter, did not correct the registration in the hospital’s systems and was not accompanied by acceptance of responsibility. Beyond the mistake itself, this is a grave and ongoing disregard. To this day, no substantive response has been given to our inquiries by the hospital’s management or the health fund’s management, and no responsible official has been appointed to address the consequences, which continue. This is not how a system entrusted with human life should operate. We expect immediate intervention by the Health Ministry, instructing the relevant bodies to act fairly, take full responsibility and take all necessary steps to rectify the situation.”
Kaplan Medical Center said in response: “We deeply regret the distress caused to the patient as a result of human error in the medical record. From the moment the mistake became known, it was proactively and immediately corrected in the hospital’s records, and an update regarding the error was conveyed to the relevant authorities, including the Health Ministry, the Population Authority, the National Insurance Institute and others. The hospital maintained continuous and ongoing contact with the patient and her husband and continued to address every issue raised by the patient or her representatives.”
The Population and Immigration Authority said: “This is a case that occurred several months ago. After incorrect information was transferred from the hospital, the death was registered. Upon receipt of a corrective notice from the hospital, the registration was corrected back in November 2025. To prevent difficulties, a new biometric ID card was issued to her already in early December. The death registration was canceled following the hospital’s corrective notice on November 25.”