Former Israeli PM Ariel Sharon dies after eight-year coma

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has died, Israeli Army Radio said, quoting a relative of his family.

He was 85 years old and had been in a coma since 2006 when a stroke incapacitated him at the height of his political power.

"Ariel Sharon has passed away," said Shlomo Noy, a spokesman for Sheba medical center in Tel Aviv, where Sharon was being treated for most of the past eight years, on Saturday.

Officials at the hospital announced a week ago that Sharon's health had deteriorated sharply and that he was in "grave condition" with his family at his bedside.

"He was considered to be in a state of minimal consciousness, with ups and downs in his medical condition, and minimal non-verbal communication," Noy said.

Sharon the controversial self-styled "warrior" who dominated Israel's military and political landscape for decades, first had a small stroke in December 2005 and was put on blood thinners before experiencing a severe brain hemorrhage on January 4, 2006.

After spending months in the Jerusalem hospital where he was initially treated, Sharon was transferred to the long-term care facility at Tel Hashomer hospital.

He was taken home briefly at one point but returned to the hospital, where he has remained since.

In September, Sharon underwent surgery to insert a new feeding tube.

Even so, for many Israelis he will be mourned as a giant figure who played a key role in shaping Israel both as a soldier and a statesman. His passing severs the last link to the iconic generation which fought in the 1948 war that followed the declaration of the state. His reputation as a fearless - and controversial - soldier was matched by his uncompromising ideology as a politician.

Among Palestinians and leftwing Israelis, he will be remembered as a powerful and reviled champion of Israel's colonial settlement project, and the political force behind the construction of the vast concrete and steel separation barrier that snakes through the West Bank. Many will not forgive his role in the killing of hundreds of Palestinians in refugee camps in Beirut in the 1980s.

Sharon - known as "Arik" to his friends, "the Bulldozer" to his critics - was a giant figure, both literally and metaphorically, in Israel. He was accused of war crimes after between 800 and 2,000 Palestinians were butchered at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982 in Lebanon by Phalangist Christians while Israeli forces stood by. Sharon was defence minister at the time.

But his reputation as a belligerent and uncompromising rightwinger was challenged in the period immediately preceding his stroke by his astonishing decision to withdraw Israeli forces and settlers from the Gaza Strip, and his determination to carry out the evacuation in the face of virulent opposition and accusations of betrayal.

Analysts were divided over whether the man who had been a driving force of the settlement enterprise then intended to initiate a much more complex withdrawal of settlers from the West Bank, or whether he had "sacrificed" Gaza in order to maintain Israel's hold on the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Following his incapacitation, Ehud Olmert assumed the role of prime minister. Kadima, the party Sharon founded after breaking with the rightwing Likud shortly before his demise, won the largest number of seats, with Olmert at its helm, in the general election of March 2006.

Kadima, on the centre-right of the Israeli political spectrum, was predicted to reshape the electoral landscape. But the party has floundered in the vagaries of Israeli politics, with its multitude of parties and unstable proportional representation electoral system. In last January's election, the party won only two seats.

Olmert was seen as technocratic leader in contrast to the colourful, ideological, strongman image that Sharon enjoyed.

In a foreword to Sharon's autobiography, Warrior, the late Israeli journalist Uri Dan wrote: "Though much of the world knows him by the title of this autobiography, he is fundamentally a man of peace." Many assessments of Sharon's life and legacy will dispute that.