Sharon has emergency surgery

Ariel Sharon

JERUSALEM - Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, comatose since a stroke last month, underwent emergency surgery to remove parts of a damaged intestine and a hospital official said he was out of immediate danger.

Shlomo Mor-Yosef, director of Hadassah Hospital, said that while the surgery went well, Sharon's main problem remained his continuing state of unconsciousness and "the dramatic event this morning will not help him recover and is not a good sign".

Medical experts hold little hope for the 77-year-old leader's recovery after a massive brain haemorrhage on January 4. He has been in a coma since the stroke.

"The condition of Prime Minister Sharon is stable but critical," Mor-Yosef told reporters after the four-hour operation. "In the morning, there was really immediate danger to his life, but now ... (there is) no immediate danger."

Sharon was rushed to the operating theatre after a CT scan revealed intestinal damage stemming from reduced blood flow that caused tissue to die.

"We removed 50 centimetres from his bowel, or 20 inches," Mor-Yosef said.

Earlier, a hospital source said doctors did not expect Sharon to survive the day and a hospital spokeswoman described his condition as the most critical since admission.

Sharon's death would almost certainly leave Ehud Olmert, named interim prime minister after Sharon's brain haemorrhage last month, in charge until elections in six weeks.

Olmert has stepped swiftly into the shoes of the former general who dominated the Middle East scene for decades, pledging to press ahead with Sharon's tough security policies and threatening to set Israel's final borders unilaterally if peacemaking with the Palestinians remained frozen.

Opinion polls predict the centrist Kadima party, which Sharon founded after a rebellion in his right-wing Likud over Israel's Gaza pullout last summer, will easily win the March 28 general election with Olmert at its helm.

Government officials said Olmert was being kept up to date on Sharon's condition and family members and a clutch of senior advisers rushed to the hospital.

Medial coma

After suffering his massive stroke, Sharon was put into a medically induced coma. Doctors have failed to rouse him.

Earlier this month they inserted a feeding tube in his stomach in preparation for possible transfer to a long-term care facility, underscoring medical experts' view that he would never recover.

Long reviled in the Arab world but increasingly regarded as a peacemaker by the West, Sharon suffered his stroke at a crucial juncture in Israeli politics, as he was fighting for re-election on a promise to end conflict with the Palestinians.

In recent years, he has voiced support for a Palestinian state but demanded the disarming of Palestinian militant groups before he would resume peace talks.

Olmert has hammered home that demand, part of a U.S.-backed peace "road map" that also calls on Israel to stop Jewish settlement expansion, with added force since the Islamic militant group Hamas won the January 25 Palestinian election.

Sharon suffered his stroke a day before he was to check into Hadassah Hospital for a procedure to correct a tiny defect in his heart that was said to have contributed to a mild stroke he suffered two weeks earlier.

Doctors had treated Sharon with blood thinners before the planned heart operation, and some in the medical community have questioned the wisdom of such treatment because Sharon's second stroke was caused by massive bleeding in the brain.

- REUTERS