Waking of Sharon Being Slowed

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s doctors opted Wednesday to keep him under low-level sedation, slowing their attempts to bring him out of his medically induced coma.

A week after the 77-year-old Israeli leader suffered a massive stroke, he remained unconscious and in critical condition despite some initial signs of brain activity such as moving his limbs in response to pain stimulus.

The medical team at Hadassah University Medical Center indicated that it would be some days before its members could assess the degree of brain damage inflicted by the prime minister’s hemorrhagic stroke. A significant degree of impairment is almost certain, the doctors have said.

Doctors, who had said they hoped to take Sharon off the sedatives altogether Wednesday, gave no precise explanation for the delay. They had, however, also said attempts to restore the prime minister to consciousness could be a stop-and-go process.

“You can halt things for a few hours, get an idea of what is happening,” Yair Birenbaum, a senior physician at Hadassah, told Army Radio on Wednesday.

Birenbaum also said declarations a day earlier that Sharon’s life was no longer in imminent danger might have been premature. “I think it’s a little too soon,” he said.

Hospital officials Wednesday broke with what had become a routine of news conferences outside the landmark medical center in Ein Kerem, located on a rocky hillside on Jerusalem’s outskirts. The hospital’s director, Dr. Shlomo Mor-Yosef, had briefed reporters, usually several times a day. The hospital said it would begin issuing written statements.

Before he was stricken Jan. 4, Sharon had been expected to cruise to a landslide victory in Israel’s March 28 elections at the head of his new party, Kadima, or Forward. Even without him, the centrist party is still performing strongly in the polls.

A new survey commissioned by the Haaretz newspaper and Israel’s Channel 10 forecast that Kadima, if headed by acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, would win 44 of 120 seats in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. The left-leaning Labor Party was forecast to take 16 seats, with 13 for the right-wing Likud Party that Sharon abandoned seven weeks ago.

Although aides and doctors have said it is nearly certain that Sharon will be unable to resume official duties, Israeli media reports said Wednesday that his party was considering symbolically placing him at the head of its slate of candidates in the March elections. That idea was swiftly lambasted by opponents.

“At a time that the prime minister, an older man fighting for his life, is in such grave condition ... this would be a really cynical use of the man as we remember him,” said Shelly Yehimovitch, a former journalist who is running for parliament as a Labor candidate. “There must be a limit to bad taste.”

The controversy, while fairly minor by the sometimes vitriolic standards of Israeli political discourse, seemed to signal the end of what has been an unofficial moratorium on electioneering due to Sharon’s medical crisis.

Wednesday also brought a confrontation in another arena that had stayed quiet during the week since Sharon’s stroke. Israeli forces clashed with about 150 Jewish settlers at an illegal outpost on the fringes of the Gush Etzion settlement block south of Jerusalem. Five arrests were reported.

Israel is obliged under the U.S.-backed “road map” peace plan to dismantle dozens of unauthorized outposts of existing settlements that have sprouted all over the West Bank. The scene of Wednesday’s clash was a small outpost called Neve Daniel, where settlers had moved temporary trailers and laid foundations for permanent buildings.

A larger-scale confrontation was brewing at the outpost of Amona, outside the West Bank settlement of Ofra. Authorities have indicated that in coming days they will attempt to remove about 40 settler families living at Amona, reviving memories of the late-summer evacuation of the 21 Jewish settlements of the Gaza Strip and four small settlements in the northern West Bank.

The main settler umbrella group, the Yesha Council, has temporarily moved its headquarters to Amona and vowed to forcefully resist any evacuation attempts.

“The struggle will be very determined,” said Pinchas Wallerstein, a settler leader. “If we are beaten, if we are thrown in jail, we are ready to pay the price.”