Israel's Peres Pledges to Get back to Work after Heart Scare
Former Israeli president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres left hospital on Tuesday, five days after surgery for heart trouble, saying he was keen to get back to work.
"I'm so happy to return to work, that was the whole purpose of this operation," he told reporters at Sheba hospital near Tel Aviv.
Peres, 92, is a founder of the Peres Peace Center and active in Israeli and international affairs. He was hospitalized Thursday after experiencing chest pains.
The hospital said he had suffered a "mild cardiac event" and underwent catheterization to widen an artery.
"Thank you with all my heart, with all my repaired heart," he told medical staff, standing at a podium in a blue suit and orange tie.
He also spoke of his sorrow over the fatal stabbing of an Israeli woman in her home in a settlement in the West Bank on Sunday, an attack that drew widespread Israeli outrage. A teenage Palestinian has been arrested in connection with the stabbing.
Peres looked well but spoke in a weak voice.
He did not say whether he intended to carry out a planned trip Wednesday to the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he had scheduled 15 meetings with world leaders and international officials, and did not take questions from reporters at the hospital.
His surgeon said on Friday that he had advised against the trip.
A co-architect of the 1993 Oslo peace accords, Peres won the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize jointly with Israeli premier Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated the following year, and then-Palestinian president Yasser Arafat.
The last of Israel's founding fathers, Peres has held nearly every major office in the country, including prime minister twice and president from 2007-2014.
Source: Agence France Presse
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