Sharon 'undergoing emergency surgery'

Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon underwent emergency surgery today after a brain scan revealed a rise in intracranial pressure and some bleeding in his brain.

Outside experts said the prime minister’s prognosis was not good.

Sharon’s blood pressure also rose and one of his brain lobes expanded slightly, said Dr. Shlomo Mor-Yosef, the director of Hadassah Hospital, where Sharon is being treated.

Sharon’s aides rushed to the hospital to be with him during the surgery, his second in two days.

“It was decided to bring the prime minister to the operating room in order to deal with these two issues, to drain the bleeding and to decrease the intracranial pressure,” he said.

Doctors did not elaborate on Sharon’s prognosis, but an aide to Shimon Peres said the veteran Israeli politician’s staff was told that Sharon’s situation is “not good”.

Dr. Avi Cohen, director of the neurovascular unit at Soroka Medical Centre in Beersheba, said the prognosis was poor. “It certainly does not forecast good things regarding (Sharon’s) ... ability to recover,” Cohen, who is not a member of Sharon’s medical team, told Israel’s Channel 2.

The surgery today followed a seven-hour operation Sharon underwent yesterday morning after he suffered a massive brain haemorrhage. Doctors had put him in a medically-induced coma to give his body time to heal, but most outside experts said his chances for recovery were slim.

Aides to Sharon said they were working on the assumption he would not return to work.

This morning, doctors sent him back for a brain scan to monitor his condition. After the scan, he was rushed back into the emergency room, Mor-Yosef said.

Sharon’s sudden, grave illness left his ambitious peace agenda in doubt and stunned Israelis, who were grappling with the likelihood that the man who dominated politics in the regions for decades would never return to power. “Between hope and despair,” read the banner headline in the Maariv daily newspaper.

Sharon’s sons, Omri and Gilad, were camped out in a room next door to their father’s at the neurological intensive care unit.

Sharon’s deputy, Ehud Olmert, has taken the reins as acting prime minister and tried to convey a sense of stability. Leaders of Sharon’s new Kadima Party said they would rally around Olmert and a new poll released Friday showed Kadima would still sweep March elections, even without Sharon.

Doctors said it would take time to determine how much damage was caused by the widespread stroke Sharon suffered on Wednesday night adding that media reports of permanent, significant damage were irresponsible.

Sharon’s collapse less than three months before elections also left his Kadima party, which he formed in November, in limbo.

In the short-term, Israelis appeared to still be supporting Kadima. A poll published in the Yediot Ahronot daily today found that an Olmert-headed Kadima would win 39 of 120 parliament seats, the most of any party and slightly less than the party polled under Sharon.

The dovish Labour Party would get 20 seats, and the hard-line Likud, which Sharon left to form Kadima, would capture 16 seats, according to the poll. The poll of 500 people was taken yesterday. It had an error margin of 4.4 percentage points. Some pollsters said the results might be influenced by sympathy for Sharon, and could change during the three-month campaign.

Peres would net 42 seats as head of Kadima, but some analysts said it was unlikely he would be chosen to lead the new party. Peres was to meet with Olmert later today and the acting prime minister was expect to urge Peres to remain in the party.

“We have to convince the public that the group that came together with Sharon will fill the political, ideological, societal void, which is needed for the country to go on,” Haim Ramon, a Kadima politician, told Israel’s Channel 2.

Palestinians reacted to the fall of their long-time enemy with a mix of glee and apprehension. Some Palestinian leaders are worried that Sharon’s illness could derail their January 25 parliamentary elections. “We are watching with great worry at what might happen if he is harmed,” said Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, who called Olmert to express wishes for Sharon’s recovery.

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.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice praised Sharon as “a man of enormous courage,” and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said he was praying for a miraculous recovery.

Two prominent rabbis visited Sharon’s bedside yesterday 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 hard-line Likud politicians 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 hard-line Likud Party. Sharon briefly returned to the army to lead the fight against Egypt during the 1973 Mideast war.

As defence 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 pull-out, 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 hour-long 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”.