Cabinet Vote Ends Sharon’s Tenure as Prime Minister

Ariel Sharon’s outsized brown leather chair sat empty at his Cabinet’s table for the last time Tuesday as government ministers formally ended the stricken Israeli leader’s tenure as prime minister.

By a solemn and unanimous vote, the Cabinet declared Sharon, who has been in a coma since suffering a devastating stroke Jan. 4, to be permanently incapacitated.

The vote was a formality, spurred by legal necessity. Sharon’s deputy, Ehud Olmert, assumed the duties of office the night the 78-year-old leader suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke. Olmert’s 100-day temporary tenure would have run out during the weeklong Jewish holiday of Passover, which begins at dusk today.

The vote officially transferred powers of the post as of Friday to Olmert, who is already in the process of forming a new government after his party’s victory in March 28 elections.

Although Sharon has been thought to have almost no chance of making a recovery that would allow him to return to public life, Tuesday’s declaration was for many here a melancholy milestone in what has been a drawn-out national drama.

“It is a difficult and sad day for all of us,” Cabinet Secretary Yisrael Maimon told his fellow ministers. “We never thought this moment would arrive.”

Sharon, a veteran army general who spent nearly all his political life as an unreconstructed hawk and a champion of the Jewish settlement movement, underwent a political sea change in his final two years. He oversaw Israel’s turbulent withdrawal last summer from the Gaza Strip and the uprooting of settlements whose strategic placement he had personally helped plan decades earlier.

In the more than three months since Sharon’s hospitalization, Olmert, 60, has been scrupulously careful to avoid any appearance of seeking to usurp his former mentor’s powers.

He worked out of his own ministerial offices rather than the prime minister’s bureau. And at every Cabinet meeting, starting with a shellshocked gathering the morning after Sharon’s stroke, Olmert sat to the right of his boss’ empty chair, which was big enough to accommodate the prime minister’s substantial girth.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Olmert left untouched on the table a small gavel that Sharon once used to call meetings to order, and spoke only briefly to ministers.

“I thank the members of the government for their vote, and their trust,” he said quietly.

The centrist Kadima party that Sharon founded two months before his stroke won the largest share of seats, albeit not a majority, in the parliamentary elections. That victory virtually ensures that Olmert will be the next prime minister. He is now in the midst of complex negotiations with rival parties to form a governing coalition.

Family and close friends have kept a vigil for Sharon at Jerusalem’s hillside Hadassah University Medical Center at Ein Kerem since the night he was rushed to the hospital from his Negev desert ranch.

Sharon, who has undergone eight surgeries since the stroke, received a CT scan Monday that ascertained his condition was unchanged.

Sharon is expected to be moved at some point from the intensive care unit at Hadassah to a long-term care facility.

Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting was not entirely given over to a symbolic farewell. Ministers also ratified a plan to sever nearly all contacts with the Palestinians’ new Hamas-led government.

Israeli officials also defended an ongoing campaign of intense artillery fire on northern Gaza, aimed at preventing Palestinian militants from firing homemade rockets toward Israel. An 8-year-old Palestinian girl was killed and her mother and several siblings gravely wounded when a shell fell on their home Monday.

The army expressed regret over the death but blamed militants for using populated areas as rocket-launching grounds.

“The terrorists are the ones who choose their site of operations, not us,” said the Israeli military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, as he toured artillery positions outside Gaza.

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Times special correspondent Vita Bekker in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.