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 symbolised 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 Centre 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 said.
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.
“We are defining his condition as critical, and there is definitely a threat to his life,” he said.
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 shock, unilateral decision to pull Israeli troops and settlers out of the Gaza Strip in 2005.
“He’ll be remembered as the last of his generation of Israeli fighters and founders,” Dedi Cohen, a 38-year-old lawyer, said in Tel Aviv.
“He was a bulldozer who got things done. I know he was controversial, but he had values. He stood for something. That’s missing today.”
Raanan Gissin, a former senior aide to Sharon, said that doctors believe death could come within days or even hours.
“It’s a very sad moment ... for people in Israel because Ariel Sharon was an icon in Israel,” Gissin said.
Sharon’s devastating 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 his long-standing enemy, 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.