ISRAEL: Former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon comatose for nearly five years transferred from hospital to his home

Record ID: 401166

  • Title: ISRAEL: Former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon comatose for nearly five years transferred from hospital to his home
  • Date: 13th November 2010
  • Summary: NEAR SDEROT, ISRAEL (NOVEMBER 12, 2010) (REUTERS) WIDE OF RANCH SIGN READING: 'SHIQMIM FARM' VIEW OF CATTLE IN FARM AMBULANCE THAT BROUGHT SHARON PARKED NEAR HOUSE WIDE OF AMBULANCE THAT BROUGHT SHARON PARKED NEAR HOUSE ON FARM
  • Embargoed: 28th November 2010 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Israel
  • Country: Israel
  • Topics: Domestic Politics
  • Reuters ID: LVA4E3WHS1KEBNKYK4LXZ6K0DS8A
  • Story Text: Israel's comatose former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was moved back to his desert ranch on Friday (November 12), leaving the secure hospital ward that had been his home for almost five years, officials said.
    Eighty-two-year-old Sharon will continue to receive treatment at Sycamore Farm, where as premier he would convene advisors to plan strategies such as Israel's 2002 offensive in the Palestinian West Bank and the surprise 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
    Felled by a stroke in January 2006, ex-general Sharon left behind an often jittery Jewish state that has fought two wars while charting an uncertain course in U.S.-sponsored peace talks with the Palestinians.
    It was the aspiration of any patient or hospital for a chronic patient to be returned home where possible, said Prof Shlomo Noy, director of rehabilitation at the Sheba Medical Centre outside Tel Aviv, where Sharon had been receiving care.
    Asked whether there was any chance of Sharon making a significant recovery -- or even returning to public life, as a few of of his loyalists envisage -- Noy told Israel's Army Radio that there is hope that his situation may get better. But, added Noy, any improvements were not likely to be dramatic.
    After being stabilised for brain hemorrhage, Sharon settled into what medical staff and the few friends allowed to visit describe as a limbo state -- uncommunicative but apparently responding to basic stimuli like television.
    He is said to have kept much of the fat that made him a favourite of satires and gave girth to his nickname "bulldozer".
    Ehud Olmert, Sharon's deputy and successor, recalled in a memoir telling then-U.S. President George W. Bush that the ex-leader's two sons refused to consider removing him from life support as they believed his condition was not irretrievable.
    Sharon spearheaded Israel's repulsion of Egyptian forces in the 1973 war.
    As defence minister in 1982, he masterminded the Lebanon invasion but was forced to step down over the massacre there of Palestinian refugees by allied Christian militiamen.
    But while many Arabs reviled his war record and zeal to build on occupied land, Sharon won respect as prime minister for ploughing through Israel's fractious coalition politics to form the new, centrist Kadima party and pull out of Gaza.
    Whether Sharon, who at one point boxed in former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat with tanks, would have secured a peace accord remains debated, not least as Hamas Islamists opposed to coexistence with Israel were quick to fill the Gaza vacuum.
    The corruption- and infighting-riddled Likud party that Sharon abandoned has rebounded, its rightist Benjamin Netanyahu serving as premier astride a mostly stable coalition today.
    Installing Sharon in Sycamore Farm would take around 48 hours and may require he be brought back to the hospital for check-ups on his adjustments, Noy said.
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