Sharon Has 3rd Round Of Surgery
Deputy Olmert Seen As Successor in Party

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, January 7, 2006

JERUSALEM, Jan. 6 -- Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon showed modest improvement Friday following five hours of emergency surgery to stop fresh bleeding and swelling in his brain, hospital officials said.

The operation was the third doctors have performed on Sharon, 77 and vastly overweight, since he suffered a massive stroke Wednesday evening.

Shlomo Mor-Yosef, director of Hadassah-Ein Kerem Hospital, where Sharon is being treated, said surgeons successfully reduced the dangerous pressure on his brain and stanched bleeding detected earlier in the day through a brain scan.

Speaking to reporters outside the hospital as the Jewish Sabbath began, Mor-Yosef said Sharon, whose blood pressure was also fluctuating, was rushed into surgery just before noon to drain the blood and reduce pressure on the brain. A post-surgery CT scan -- a special multiple X-ray screening process that allows viewing of interior body parts -- revealed improvement in Sharon's condition and showed "no active bleeding."

But he cautioned that Sharon, who was taken to the intensive care unit for recovery, remained in a grave physical state. "Despite the improvements in the scan, which we consider significant, the prime minister's condition remains critical but stable," Mor-Yosef said.

Doctors had hoped Sharon would be able to rest in a medically induced coma until Sunday, giving his brain time to heal from the trauma it suffered from the stroke and subsequent surgery. But the new hemorrhaging underscored the precarious state of Sharon's health, and independent doctors said the prime minister's prognosis for a full recovery was slim at best.

"Currently we're talking about keeping him alive and his brain intact so he can gain strength," said Avi Cohen, a neurosurgeon from Soroka Medical Center in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba, who is not directly involved in Sharon's case.

"Statistics lean toward the possibility he will still be alive next week," Cohen said. "On the other hand, it very well could be that he will wake up from his coma with deficiencies in the left part of his body. The question will be whether he will be able to move parts of his body and whether he will be able to communicate at all."

The hilltop hospital where Sharon spent most of the day in surgery remained the focus of national attention Friday, as Israel's leading rabbis continued to call on Israelis to pray for the prime minister's recovery.

In Washington, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice canceled a trip to Indonesia and Australia to monitor the condition of Sharon, the Bush administration's staunchest ally in the Middle East.

President Bush endorsed Sharon's unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip last year and supports his ambition to maintain the largest Israeli settlement blocs in the West Bank under any final agreement with the Palestinians, who reject the idea because they say it undermines their bid for a viable independent state.

Rice "decided, because of the situation in the Middle East, it was the right decision to stay here in Washington," said Sean McCormack, a State Department spokesman.

Sharon's almost certain departure from office has caused tremendous uncertainty in the political arena he has dominated since becoming prime minister nearly five years ago, particularly among members of his newly formed Kadima party.

Sharon created the party in November, drawing largely from members of his hawkish Likud Party and the dovish Labor Party, which have little in common except support for the highly popular prime minister.

Ehud Olmert, the acting prime minister and a close Sharon ally, has emerged as the top candidate to lead the centrist party into national elections scheduled for March 28.

Public opinion polls conducted since Sharon's stroke have shown Kadima winning as many as 40 seats in Israel's 120-seat parliament with Olmert in charge -- comparable to the party's projected showing under Sharon. But some political analysts here say most of that support is an expression of sympathy for the prime minister and may pass quickly.

Shimon Peres, the longtime Labor stalwart who left to support his old friend's new party, met Friday with Olmert to discuss what he said were "ways to continue Sharon's policies -- both an uncompromising war against terror and an endless effort toward peace."

A poll conducted for the newspaper Haaretz and Channel 10 television showed that Kadima would win 42 seats with Peres as leader.

But Peres, 82, is not considered a serious candidate to lead a party dominated largely by former Likud members. He declined Friday to say whether he would stay in Kadima or return to Labor, which is now led by former labor union leader Amir Peretz, who defeated Peres in a leadership vote last year despite his relative inexperience in national partisan politics.

Although he has lost a number of national elections, Peres is considered a valuable political asset because of his broad appeal among traditional Labor voters of his generation.

"I will give a statement in due time," Peres told reporters after meeting with the acting prime minister. "I am not willing to give fragments. I first want to end the conversation with Mr. Olmert that we have not yet finished."