Sharon shows signs of recovery
12/1/2006 14:57
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has continued to show signs of slight
recovery while his centrist Kadima party has received the strongest support in
latest opinion polls.
Sharon's blood pressure was found to rise when his
younger son spoke to him at his bedside, one of his doctors said
Wednesday.
"He (Sharon) didn't open his eyes, but when Gilad (Sharon's son)
spoke to him ... his blood pressure rose immediately," Dr. Umanski told Israel
Channel 2 TV.
Sharon has been in improvements ever since Monday, reacting to
pain stimuli in both sides of his body. Doctors said that they would by
Wednesday evening halt the sedatives that had kept Sharon in a medically induced
coma for the past week.
Doctors have also cautioned against being
over-optimistic about his chances of recovery, which could take months. And the
prospects for his return to office are widely seen as dim.
While Israelis
kept vigil for Sharon, polls in the Haaretz and Maariv newspapers showed
Wednesday that his newly-founded Kadima party would take 44-45 seats in Israel's
120-seat parliament in the run-up to March 28 elections.
The center-left
Labor Party under Amir Peretz would get 16-18 seats. The rightist Likud, led by
Benjamin Netanyahu, would secure 13-15 seats, according to the latest
survey.
The ever strongest showing of Kadima, which Sharon founded after
leaving Likud in November, indicated that even without the incapacitated prime
minister, his deputy and interim premier Ehud Olmert would head the party to an
easy victory.
Voters see Sharon as the best man to carry out a unilateral
pullout from the settlements in the Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank, in a
step toward peace with the Palestinians, who insist, however, that Israel must
fully withdraw from the occupied territories.
Olmert, 60, a former Jerusalem
mayor and Sharon loyalist, is seen as all but certain to keep the job until the
March elections.
Senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat is already looking
to Olmert for talks.
Wishing Sharon well, Erekat told British Sky television
that "the unilateral way ... brought him (Sharon) and his people no peace and no
security ... This is why I am offering to Olmert to come back to the negotiating
table."
Meanwhile, Netanyahu has ordered four Likud ministers including
Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom to resign from the cabinet on Thursday.
The
Likud ministers had originally planned to resign on Sunday, but Netanyahu
decided to postpone the walkout due to Sharon's sudden grave illness in order to
show national unity.
Following an earlier withdrawal by Labor, the
resignation of the Likud ministers would leave Olmert with just six other active
cabinet members, all of them from Kadima.
But Israeli media reported that the
four ministers would ignore the order, plunging the hard-line movement into
further disarray after Sharon's defection.
The Israeli cabinet is serving as
a caretaker government until the March elections.
Xinhua
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