Israel’s ‘Bulldozer’ Ariel Sharon critically ill

JERUSALEM // Former prime minister Ariel Sharon, comatose since a 2006 stroke, slipped closer to death on Thursday after a sharp decline in the condition of the ex-general.

Reviled by Arabs over his hardline policies and viewed with a mixture of respect and suspicion by many Israelis, 85-year-old Sharon has been on life support at Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv for the past eight years.

“I am no prophet, but the feeling of his doctors and his sons ... is that there has been a change for the worse,” said Sheba director Zeev Rotstein.

In the first official medical statement on Sharon’s condition, Rotstein said doctors expect a deterioration in several life-sustaining organs.

“We are defining his condition as critical, and there is definitely a threat to his life,” he said. “The feeling of everyone ... is that this decline is very serious.”

Sharon’s two sons were at his bedside, doctors said, and a state funeral was planned.

One of Israel’s most famous generals, Sharon left his mark on the region through military invasion, Jewish settlement building on captured land and a surprise unilateral decision to pull Israeli troops and settlers out of the Gaza Strip in 2005.

In 1983, an Israeli state inquiry found Sharon, then the defence minister, indirectly responsible for the killing of hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children at Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. He was forced to resign his post.

The slaughter took place after the Israeli army, which invaded Lebanon in 1982, allowed Israeli-backed Christian Phalangist militiamen to enter the camps, ostensibly to search for Palestinian gunmen.

Raanan Gissin, a former senior aide to Sharon, said that doctors believe death could come within days or even hours.

Sharon’s illness began shortly after he quit the right-wing Likud party, where he had promoted Jewish settlement in territory captured in the 1967 Middle East war, and founded a centrist faction with the declared aim of advancing peace with the Palestinians.

Battling a Palestinian uprising that began in 2000 after peace talks collapsed, Sharon initiated the building of a contentious barrier across the occupied West Bank and presented a plan to “disengage” from the Gaza Strip.

Critics of Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza point to the territory’s seizure two years later by Hamas opposed to Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and repeated rocket fire from the enclave.

* Reuters