In this January 20, 2001 file photo, Opposition Likud party leader and candidate for prime minister Ariel Sharon plays with his dog, Schwartz, on his ranch in southern Israel. Photo: AP/Michael Kremer

Ariel Sharon, the hard-charging Israeli general and prime minister who was admired and hated for his battlefield exploits and ambitions to reshape the Middle East, died yesterday, eight years after a stroke left him in a coma from which he never awoke. He was 85.

As one of Israel’s most famous soldiers, Sharon was known for bold tactics and an occasional refusal to obey orders. As a politician he became known as “the bulldozer”, a man contemptuous of his critics while also capable of getting things done.

He led his country into a divisive war in Lebanon in 1982 and was branded as indirectly responsible for the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians at the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps outside Beirut when his troops allowed allied Lebanese militias into the camps. Yet ultimately, he transformed himself into a prime minister and statesman.

Sharon’s son Gilad announced the death. Sharon’s health had taken a downturn over the past week-and-a-half as a number of bodily organs, including his kidneys, stopped functioning, and doctors on Thursday pronounced his condition “grave”.

“He has gone. He went when he decided to go,” Gilad Sharon said outside the hospital where his father had been treated in recent years.

The life and career of the man Israelis called Arik will be remembered for its three distinct stages: his eventful and controversial time in uniform, his years as a vociferous political operator who helped create Israel’s settlement movement and mastermind of the Lebanon invasion, then his successful term as a pragmatist prime minister, capped by a dramatic withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and curtailed at the height of his popularity by his sudden stroke.

The Gaza pullout culminated in a gradual abandonment of the hard-line policies for which he was known. In the tumultuous summer of 2005, he pulled all of Israel’s settlers and soldiers out of the seaside strip, having played a key role in putting them there in the first place. “The fate of Netzarim is the fate of Tel Aviv,” Sharon had famously said, referring to a Gaza settlement, just three years earlier.

Characteristically, the move was unilateral; Sharon was dubious that much good could come of talks with the Palestinians.

He has gone. He went when he decided to go- Gilad Sharon

Sharon painted his ‘disengagement’ plan as a step to reduce friction between Israelis and Palestinians. It was accompanied by construction of a massive separation barrier in the West Bank. While presented as security measures, they also represented an admission of sorts that continued control of the fast-growing Palestinian population could threaten Israel’s Jewish and democratic character.

A few months later, he left the hawkish Likud party, which he helped found, and created the centrist Kadima as a vehicle for himself, planning to lead it to a third election victory. But a few months later – 77 years old and considerably overweight – he suffered two strokes. The second one, in 2006, left him comatose in a Jerusalem hospital. His deputy, Ehud Olmert, became prime minister and led Kadima to victory in the election.

“Arik was a brave soldier and a daring leader who loved his nation and his nation loved him,” President Shimon Peres, a longtime friend and rival of Sharon, said yesterday, using Sharon’s nickname. “He was one of Israel’s great protectors and most important architects, who knew no fear and certainly never feared vision.”

Ariel Sharon was born to Russian immigrant parents on February 26 1928, in the small farming community of Kfar Malal, north of Tel Aviv. He joined the Haganah, the pre-state Jewish defence force, at 14 and later went on to command an infantry platoon during the 1948 Mideast war over Israel’s creation. He was seriously wounded in battle with the Jordanian Legion over control of the road to Jerusalem.

By 1953 he was commanding Unit 101, a commando force formed to carry out reprisals for Arab attacks. After the killing of an Israeli woman and her two children, his troops blew up more than 40 houses in Qibya, a West Bank village then ruled by Jordan, killing 69 Arabs, most or all of them civilians.

Three years later, after Israel’s invasion of the Sinai Peninsula, Sharon was rebuked for engaging in what his commanders regarded as an unnecessary battle with Egyptian forces in which some 30 Israeli soldiers died.

But accolades mounted as well. His finest hour in uniform, as he described it, came after Egypt and Syria attacked Israel in the 1973 Mideast war. Sharon was brought out of retirement by an army desperate for leadership and commanded 27,000 Israelis in a daring drive across the Suez Canal, an operation that turned the tide of the fighting. A photograph of a boyish, 45-year-old Sharon, a bloody bandage around his head, remains one of the most enduring images of that war.

Sharon later became a Cabinet minister in the hawkish government led by Menachem Begin. When Begin shifted to the centre – much as Sharon would do decades later – and signed a peace agreement with Egypt that required an Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai, Sharon voted against it.