Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, is fighting for his life after hours of emergency surgery as his closest allies began to realise that his political career was over.
He is under heavy sedation and connected to a respirator after what was officially described as an ‘extensive’ stroke, the second in three weeks, and a massive brain haemorrhage.
Mr Sharon's illness, which aides privately accept spells the end of his five-year premiership and more than a half a century of operating at the centre of Israeli military and political life, leaves the biggest political vacuum in the country since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin a decade ago.
Insisting on anonymity, one of more than 30 close aides allowed to maintain a vigil next to the operating theatre during Mr Sharon's two sessions on Wednesday night and yesterday morning admitted the Prime Minister would never return to office. ‘Now the main question is whether the doctors will be able to save his life,’ he added.
Professor Shlomo Mor-Yosef, director of Jerusalem's Hadassah Ein Karem hospital, told reporters: ‘The Prime Minister is suffering from low intracranial pressure, and is heavily sedated. He will be ventilated for at least the next 24 hours, and perhaps even for the next few days.’
Professor Mor-Yosef said he had come to refute rumours ‘flooding the country’ that the Prime Minister had already died and sought to pre-empt suggestions that 77-year-old Mr Sharon was in a worse condition than doctors admitted. ‘As Hadassah's director, I am obligated to bring every change in the Prime Minister's condition to light through statements,’ he said.
Doctors refused to confirm Mr Sharon had suffered irreversible brain damage. The aide said he would stay under sedation for three or four days to allow his brain to recover from eight hours of surgery and added: ‘Nobody is able at this point to give a damage assessment, but we know that there has been a great deal of damage. The extent will not be determined until he is woken, if he's able to be woken.’
There was also no confirmation of widespread reports that one factor that triggered the brain haemorrhage Mr Sharon had on Wednesday night may have been the blood-thinning medication he had been taking since his first stroke three weeks ago. Yesterday he was to have had a relatively routine procedure to close the small hole in the heart thought to have contributed to the first stroke.
Professor Mor-Yosef said Mr Sharon had emerged from surgery with vital signs showing ‘functional and stable’ levels, and a CT scan showing the bleeding in his brain had been halted. But he acknowledged his condition remained ‘grave’. Amid saturation print and broadcast coverage of the Prime Minister's illness, Israel's largest mass-circulation daily Yedhiot Ahronot proclaimed in a banner headline, ‘The final battle’.
Israel's two chief rabbis, representing the Ashkenazy and Sephardic communities, joined in calling for the people to recite five psalms, and goodwill messages poured into the Hadassah from international leaders and Israeli politicians across a wide spectrum of opinion. At a cabinet meeting convened by Ehud Olmert, his deputy and now acting replacement, an empty chair was left for the absent Prime Minister.
But amid the widespread sympathy for Mr Sharon, Israel was also gripped by immediate speculation over the country's political future without the man who has overwhelmingly dominated its public life for the past five years.
Meir Shetreet, the Transport Minister and a prominent member of Kadima, the centre party formed by Mr Sharon to fight the 28 March general election, said the new party's founding members should convene in the next 48 hours to decide the leadership. Mr Shetreet suggested the party should rally behind Mr Olmert as its new leader. Mr Shetreet acknowledged Mr Sharon's personal influence had been ‘decisive’ in helping to put the party at the top of opinion polls but said he believed that people would continue to support it if it adhered to Mr Sharon's legacy.