Israel ex-PM Sharon in critical condition
Print Edition
Israeli former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, comatose since a 2006 stroke, slipped closer to death yesterday after a sharp decline in the condition of the ex-general who long symbolized Israel’s military might.
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, far from the public gaze.
“I am no prophet, but the feeling of his doctors and his sons ... is that there has been a change for the worse,” Sheba director Zeev Rotstein told reporters.
Rotstein, in the first official medical statement on Sharon’s condition after reports on Wednesday that he had suffered a kidney malfunction, said doctors expect a deterioration in several life-sustaining organs.
“The feeling of everyone ... is that this decline is very serious,” said Rotstein.
Sharon’s two sons were at his bedside, doctors said, and a state funeral was planned.
Sharon left his mark on the region through military invasion, Jewish settlement building on captured land and a shock, 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 defense 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.
“He’ll be remembered as the last of his generation of Israeli fighters and founders,” Dedi Cohen, a 38-year-old lawyer, in Tel Aviv said.
In Gaza, a Hamas leader spoke bitterly of a man the movement sees as one of the Palestinians’ worst enemies. “Ariel Sharon is going the same direction as other tyrants and criminals whose hands were covered in Palestinian blood,” said Khalil al-Hayya.
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