JERUSALEM - The attorney general was expected to notify Ehud Olmert on Sunday that he will continue to serve as Israel's acting leader through the March 28 elections, the Justice Ministry said, as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon remained in a coma from his devastating stroke.
Attorney General Meni Mazuz was leaning toward declaring Olmert acting prime minister through the elections, though no official decision has been made, said Justice Ministry spokesman Yaakov Galanti. He offered no further details.
Mazuz will continue to define Sharon as temporarily, rather than permanently, incapacitated because doctors treating the prime minister have not yet offered a prognosis, the Haaretz daily reported Sunday.
A declaration of permanent incapacitation, which would require Cabinet to name a successor to Sharon, would be irreversible.
Ron Krumer, a spokesman for Jerusalem's Hadassah Hospital where Sharon is being treated, said Sunday that his condition — critical but stable — was unchanged.
The Israeli leader, who suffered the stroke Jan. 4, has not woken since doctors began lifting his heavy sedation nearly a week ago, though Channel 1 TV has cited one of his neurosurgeons as saying he was optimistic Sharon would emerge from his coma by early next week. Some outside experts, however, say the persistent coma suggests prospects for recovery are dim.
Sharon's abrupt departure from the political stage threw Israel and the Mideast into turmoil because he was seen as the Israeli politician most capable of negotiating peace with the Palestinians.
Olmert, Sharon's ally and a proponent of further territorial concessions to the Palestinians, is seen as the prime minister's likely political heir and has quietly been easing the turbulence created by Sharon's illness. In his first major political test, he is expected to steer the Cabinet on Sunday to approve Palestinian voting in disputed east Jerusalem.
Jerusalem is the epicenter of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with both sides claiming the city as its capital. Israel initially had planned to bar Palestinian voting in east Jerusalem because candidates from the armed Hamas group were to appear on the ballot — a stand that provoked Palestinian threats to cancel the election. But last week, Israel reversed course after coming under pressure from the U.S., which is eager to promote democratic processes in the region.
According to the compromise proposal on which the Cabinet is to vote Sunday, elections in Jerusalem would go ahead, but members of armed groups like Hamas, which call for Israel's destruction, wouldn't be allowed to run.
Hamas is expected to make a strong showing in the overall balloting and possibly dominate parliament, bolstered by its clean-hands image and growing violence in Palestinian-run areas in recent months.
Over the weekend, U.S. officials warned that millions of dollars of aid could be in jeopardy if the Islamic group joins the Palestinian government. Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas retorted that Hamas participation in the government is not a U.S. affair, and that Hamas would be moderated by joining the Cabinet because it would have to adopt the Palestinian Authority's foundation of non-violence.
With the east Jerusalem voting crisis headed for resolution, Olmert faces another immediate test — a standoff with Jewish settlers in the volatile West Bank city of Hebron, where 500 settlers live among 160,000 Palestinians. Eight settler families have been given until Sunday to evacuate a neighborhood they took over four years ago. They are to be removed forcibly in a month's time if they disregard the evacuation order, as they are expected to do.
On Saturday, hundreds of settlers hurled stones at Palestinian homes in Hebron and tried to force their way into areas of the city that are off-limits to them before Israeli security forces brought them under control. They also torched an empty house and entered a Palestinian home to eject its inhabitants before police removed them.
Elsewhere in the West Bank, Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian mother and her armed son early Sunday in what appeared to be a mixup sparked by a feud between villagers, residents said.
Soldiers, apparently thinking they had come across a militant hideout, fired at a house on the outskirts of the village of Rojib where 20-year-old Fawzi Dwekat was standing guard with a rifle in the wake of arson attacks on the family's cars, residents said. The shots killed the man and his 50-year-old mother, Nawal, who had rushed up to the roof with other family members after hearing gunfire, they said.
Residents said soldiers shot first, and Dwekat returned fire.
The military said initial reports indicated that an army patrol was shot at from a house in the village and returned fire, killing two people and wounding three.
Col. Yuval Bazak, a commander in the region, said the people killed were not on Israel's wanted list, but forces found an M-16, a handgun and ammunition in the home.
'I am sorry about the mother who was killed. I assume she was not involved and should not have been harmed,' Bazak told Army Radio. 'We are investigating how the mother was hit.'
The shooting happened when it was dark, and the troops in the patrol thought their lives were in danger, Bazak added.
Separately Sunday, Israel closed until further notice the Karni crossing, the main cargo terminal between Israel and the
Gaza Strip, in the wake of intelligence warnings of a planned Palestinian