The hospital treating Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said yesterday that doctors will continue reducing his level of sedation and testing his reactions, more than five days after he suffered a massive stroke.
The statement from Jerusalem's Hadassah Hospital said Sharon's condition, unchanged overnight, was critical but stable. Doctors began removing anesthetics on Monday, and Sharon responded to pain stimuli with slight movements of his right leg and arm, they said.
However, doctors said it would be days before they could assess damage to his brain, critical to determining the political future of Sharon, Israel and the region.
PHOTO: AP
Sharon was still unconscious yesterday morning. Doctors said he was able to breathe on his own, though he was still hooked up to a respirator.
Doctors said on Monday that the slight progress Sharon showed after they began withdrawing sedatives that had kept him in a coma since the stroke on Wednesday was just the beginning. Considering the amount of bleeding and the many hours surgeons spent trying to stop it, doctors doubt he will recover enough to resume his duties.
If not, Israel's Cabinet would have to choose a premier to serve until March 28 elections, and the campaign, on hold because of Sharon's illness, could get underway. Acting premier Ehud Olmert was his logical successor.
Sharon was expected to win in a landslide at the head of his new, centrist Kadima Party, but without him, it would be a wide-open race -- just as Sharon's absence from Middle East diplomacy, after his unprecedented unilateral pullout from Gaza and part of the West Bank in the summer, would throw peace efforts into disarray.
The Palestinians' political future, which was to be decided in Jan. 25 parliament elections, also appeared in limbo.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas reiterated on Monday that the vote would take place on time, but Interior Minister Nasser Yousef warned that his security forces would not be able to protect polling stations against gunmen.
Abbas' Fatah Party fears it will be embarrassed by the Islamic militant Hamas in the election, and there is concern Fatah-linked gangs will attack polling stations if defeat becomes apparent.
Also, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was sending two envoys to try to resolve an Israeli-Palestinian dispute over the participation of Arab residents of Jerusalem in the election.
Abbas has said such participation is a requisite for holding the election and said he had assurances from the US that it would be allowed.
Former US president Bill Clinton said Sharon's stroke is a blow to peace efforts.
"All of us who believe in peace in the Middle East are in his debt, and so more than anything else, I pray for his health," he said.
In the Gaza Strip, where Sharon is reviled for his tough policies on Palestinians, 40 masked gunmen from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades militant group held a demonstration against the Israeli prime minister. One held a gun to a photo of Sharon that was labeled "the killer of children" and then burned the picture.
On Monday, doctors at Hadassah Hospital began gradually reducing Sharon's sedatives to rouse him from the induced coma he has been in for five days so they can assess brain damage. They said they won't have a full picture for several days.
"We are just at the beginning of a very long way," said his chief surgeon, Felix Umansky, briefing reporters for the first time. "It's too early to talk about the cognitive issue."
After the level of sedatives dropped, Sharon started breathing on his own, though he remains hooked up to a respirator and unconscious. He also lifted his right hand and leg slightly in response to pain stimulation, said Shlomo Mor-Yosef, the director of Hadassah.
Sharon's response is a "very important" sign and indicated his brain stem is working, but it's still too early to assess what impact the massive bleeding he suffered in his right brain would have on his cognitive abilities or on the left side of his body, Umansky said.
Doctors will continue lowering the level of sedatives in Sharon's body over the next several days, he said.
Sharon has not yet opened his eyes -- though his doctors were hoping he would do so when the sedative levels dropped further -- and outside experts cautioned there is no assurance he will wake up at all.
"His chances of survival are better than if the respiratory center had been damaged, but that still doesn't mean he's going to survive," said John Martin, a professor of cardiovascular medicine at University College in London.
Martin said Sharon's weight and age work against him.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema