The stroke set off one of the strangest periods in Israel’s political history. While his deputy, Ehud Olmert, quickly assumed office and led Kadima to victory in a subsequent, Sharon remained a visible presence.
Over the years, every development in his medical condition became front-page news. His sons tried to revive him by showing him family photos or bringing Sharon, who often joked about his huge size, his favorite foods. At one point, doctors moved him back to his family farm, only to return him to the hospital several days later. His son Gilad said that his father could wiggle his fingers and move his eyes.
Marina Lifshitz, a nurse who treated Sharon, said that when she showed Sharon a photo of his late wife, Lily, she saw a tear in his eye. “It is very difficult to forget that,” she said Saturday.
Over the past week and a half, doctors reported a sharp decline in his condition as various bodily organs, including his kidneys, failed. On Saturday, Dr. Shlomo Noy of the Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv said “his heart weakened and he peacefully departed” with relatives by his bedside.
“That’s it. He has gone. He went when he decided to go,” Gilad Sharon said afterward.
As a soldier, Sharon was known for daring tactics and occasional refusal to obey orders. As a politician, he was known as “the bulldozer,” contemptuous of his critics, the man who could get things done.
This go-it-alone attitude also shaped his second term as prime minister. Expressing impatience with stalled peace efforts, Sharon opted for separating Israel from the Palestinians, whose birthrate was outpacing that of his own country. He gave up Gaza, with its 21 Jewish settlements, and four West Bank settlements, the first such Israeli pullback since it captured the territories in the 1967 Mideast war.
He also began building a snaking barrier of fences, walls, razor wire and trenches to separate Israel from the West Bank, a project he initially rejected out of fear it would be seen as a tacit renunciation of Israel’s claim to the West Bank.