The Labor Court in Haifa has recognized a heart attack suffered by a 69‑year‑old maintenance worker during a police investigation as a workplace accident. Judge Keren Cohen accepted a medical opinion that the cardiac event would have been postponed were it not for the “exceptional” circumstance of the investigation.
The retiree, who had worked for 17 years at a company managing sheltered housing, was fired and asked to collect his final pay slips. The next day, police responded to his home on a complaint by his former employer alleging a break‑in. He was taken to the station and during questioning began experiencing chest pain; he was later diagnosed with a myocardial infarction.
The National Insurance Institute had declined to register the incident as an occupational accident, prompting the worker’s case before the court. Two independent medical experts were appointed to assess whether there was a causal link between the police interrogation and the heart attack.
The first expert found the worker would have had a heart attack anyway—citing risk factors including hypertension, smoking, diabetes and family history—and therefore opposed recognizing it as an occupational accident. The second expert found a clear causal link: absent the stress of the police probe, the infarction would have occurred at a later date.
Judge Cohen adopted the second expert’s findings, saying his conclusions were “clear, reasoned and based on his medical expertise, and we found no reason to reject them.” She noted that even the first expert’s report could be read to mean the heart attack would have been delayed in any case due to the interrogation, especially since he wrote that “any event elevating oxygen consumption (effort or emotional stress) beyond a certain threshold would trigger angina.”
“In other words,” the court wrote, “only the emotional upset of the interrogation can explain the heart attack at that time.” She therefore ruled the infarction a workplace accident and awarded the claimant 6,500 shekels (~US $2,015) in legal costs.