11 Jan 2014

Ariel Sharon, Israel’s former prime minister, dies

International Editor

Former Israeli PM Ariel Sharon has died, aged 85, after spending the last eight years in a coma. International Editor Lindsey Hilsum looks back at the life of the man nicknamed “the bulldozer”.

Sharon had been in a coma since suffering a massive stroke in 2006. On 2 January doctors at the Sheba Medical Centre said that his condition had deteriorated, and that they expected further deterioration in several life-sustaining organs.

Sharon’s son Gilad announced the death at the hospital where his father had been treated.

Doctors there had predicted his imminent death after his health declined sharply last week.

Ministers in Israel’s right-wing government, and the political opposition, mourned a tough and wily leader who left big footprints 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.

“The nation of Israel has today lost a dear man, a great leader and a bold warrior,” Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz said in a statement.

There was no immediate comment on the death from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, with whom Sharon’s Likud party successor, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been holding US-sponsored peace talks.

Departure of a ‘criminal’

But in Gaza, the Hamas Islamists whose political fortunes rose with the Israeli withdrawal savoured Sharon’s demise.

“We have become more confident in victory with the departure of this tyrant,” said Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zurhi, whose movement preaches the destruction of the Jewish state.

“Our people today feel extreme happiness at the death and departure of this criminal whose hands were smeared with the blood of our people and the blood of our leaders here and in exile.”

Born in 1928, Ariel Sharon worked his way up the ranks of the military.

On his way to becoming a general, Sharon served in Unit 101 – a special forces outfit whose purpose was to carry out reprisals in response to Palestinian attacks.

On resigning from the army Sharon became a politician, and was appointed Israeli minister of defence in 1981. In 1982 he spearheaded Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, driving out Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation.

Sharon was elected prime minister in February 2001 and served until his hospitalisation in 2006.