SYCAMORE FARM, Israel, Nov 13, (AFP) -Former Israeli premier Ariel Sharon was taken on Friday from the hospital bed where he has lain in a coma for nearly five years, for a trial period at home, a hospital official said.
An AFP photographer saw the intensive care ambulance carrying the ex-premier arrive at his 'Sycamore Farm' home in southern Israel early on Friday.
Shlomo Noy, head of the rehabilitation unit at Sheba Hospital, near Tel Aviv, said that 82-year-old Sharon was expected to return to the hospital on Sunday.
The exercise would be repeated several times to ascertain whether he could be treated at home on a permanent basis.
“It's a gradual process, when a hospital discharges a chronic patient to his home,” Noy told public radio.
“It's a structured process, whereby you check that the support and medical environment in which the patient is to be placed permanently is suitable.”The process was likely to entail three to four visits of 48 hours each, during which hospital staff would supervise his home treatment, he added.
On January 4, 2006, the premier suffered a massive stroke and slipped into a coma from which he has never recovered, leaving behind him a gaping political vacuum.
Sharon collapsed five months after he embarked on a radical new path which saw him pulling out all Jewish settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip after 38 years of occupation.
Since then, however, peace efforts have led nowhere. At the end of 2008, Israel launched a devastating 22-day offensive in Gaza, during which the Palestinians severed all contact.
Fresh attempts to get the sides talking, which began six weeks ago, are now deadlocked by a dispute over Israeli settlements.
Noy said that while coma patients in general were better off in their home environment, a dramatic improvement in Sharon's condition should not be expected.
“Obviously behind it is a hope that he will be better off there,” he said. “Whether he recovers or not is another question.”Before the stroke that felled him, the beefy Sharon cheerfully admitted that he had failed to heed doctors' advice to lose weight and slow down.
Rising early, working late and making frequent foreign trips, particularly 12-hour flights to the United States, he maintained the kind of punishing work schedule that would have exhausted a man half his age.
In November 2005, he left the rightwing Likud party that he helped found in 1973 and set up a new centrist party, Kadima.
The decision was his response to hardliners within Likud who battled him over his Gaza pullout.
He was first elected prime minister in 2001, after a controversial visit to a disputed holy site in Jerusalem sparked the Palestinian intifada months earlier.
Sharon was born in British-mandate Palestine in 1928, and began his military career at the age of 17. He first came to prominence on the battlefield in Israel's wars against Arab states such as Egypt.
As defence minister, he masterminded the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and siege of Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organisation headquarters in Beirut.
The following year, he was forced out in disgrace after being held “indirectly responsible” for the massacres at the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon perpetrated by his Christian Phalangist allies, an affair which led detractors to brand him the “Butcher of Beirut.”Despite a commission's recommendation that Sharon was unfit for public office, he slowly rebuilt his reputation before becoming leader in 2000 of Likud and rising to the pinnacle of government.
Before he fell ill, Sharon was an avid farmer whose private life was marred by tragedy. His first wife Margalith was killed in a car crash in 1962. Their only son, Gur, died in 1967 after he was shot while he and a friend were playing with Sharon's rifleSharon later married Margalith's younger sister Lily, and they had two sons Omri and Gilad who have worked closely with Sharon.
Sharon became a widower for the second time when Lily died of cancer in 2000. |
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