Report: Sharon undergoes emergency surgery
(AP)
Updated: 2006-01-06 18:21

Some Palestinian children gave out sweets in the Gaza Strip at news of Sharon's illness.

Foreign leaders, who embraced Sharon following his unilateral pullout from the Gaza Strip last year, also expressed concern.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice praised Sharon as "a man of enormous courage," and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said he was praying for a miraculous recovery.

Two prominent rabbis visited Sharon's bedside Thursday on the heavily guarded seventh floor of the hospital and prayed along with his family for his recovery, one of the rabbis, Yitzhak Batzri, told Israel Radio. Batzri's father, leading Jewish mystic David Batzri, held Sharon's hand to direct a prayer toward him, Yitzhak Batzri said.

"He is unconscious as everyone knows and the small happiness that we have is that we saw the family is strong, the family believes, the family is praying and hoping," Yitzhak Batzri said.

Sharon had been expected to win the March 28 election in a landslide as head of Kadima, which he formed after bolting Likud last year. Many hardline Likud lawmakers tried to torpedo the Gaza withdrawal and Sharon formed Kadima to free his hands to make further peace moves with the Palestinians.

Israelis were shocked by the illness of a man who was in public life for decades, first as a hero in Israel's earliest wars and later as the country's best known political hawk. Sharon led Israel's fight against the Palestinians during nearly five years of violence and his security credentials gave him the credibility with the Israeli public to make concessions to the Palestinians.

"He was one of a kind. I don't know any other man like him," said Joseph Lapid, head of the opposition Shinui Party.

Sharon first rose to prominence as an army officer, setting up a unit that fought Palestinian infiltrators in the 1950s. He served as a commander of the Gaza region after Israel captured the territory in 1967, before entering politics and forging the hardline Likud Party. Sharon briefly returned to the army to lead the fight against Egypt during the 1973 Mideast war.

As defense minister, Sharon directed Israel's ill-fated invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and was forced to step down by an Israeli commission of inquiry that found him indirectly responsible for a massacre of Palestinians in two refugee camps by Christian Phalangist soldiers.

Sharon re-emerged as prime minister in 2001 soon after the outbreak of new Israeli-Palestinian violence, and two years later he reversed his decades-long support for Jewish settlement, and pushed through his Gaza pullout plan.

Despite the pullout, Sharon remains widely reviled in the Arab world for his tough actions against Palestinians.

Sharon fell ill Wednesday evening while he rested at his ranch in southern Israel ahead of a medical procedure scheduled for Thursday to close a small hole in his heart. Doctors rushed him to Hadassah Hospital, instead of a hospital in nearby Beersheba, because his condition did not appear dire, Sharon aides said. He suffered the bleeding stroke during the hourlong drive to Jerusalem.

A hospital director, speaking anonymously to the Haaretz daily, said Sharon should have been in the hospital the night before his heart procedure, and he called the treatment "negligent."

Former Likud lawmaker Ronni Milo told Army Radio that Sharon should not have "reached a situation when he has to go through a catheterization on Thursday and the night before he is staying on his farm very far from the hospital."