Former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon was transferred on Sunday from Jerusalem's Hadassah hospital to a rehabilitation centre in Tel Aviv, five months after suffering a massive brain haemorrhage.
TEL AVIV: Former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon was transferred on Sunday from Jerusalem's Hadassah hospital to a rehabilitation centre in Tel Aviv, five months after suffering a massive brain haemorrhage.
Sharon arrived at the Sheba rehabilitation centre, on the outskirts of Israel's commercial capital, around an hour after he was driven out in an ambulance from the Hadassah where he had been in a coma ever since he suffered a stroke on January 4.
He was accompanied by members of his family and a security convoy, as well as medics from the Hadassah.
Professor Zeev Rothstein, director of the Sheba centre, said doctors would try to help him come off the artificial respiration but he acknowledged that the prospects of 78-year-old Sharon regaining consciousness were "extremely thin".
"We have arranged a course of treatment over the months ahead which will give him the best possible chance," Rothstein told reporters.
"For a man of his age who is in a coma and under artificial respiration, each stage of his treatment can put his life in danger -- that's why it is a process which takes time."
Despite the slim chances of a recovery, Rothstein said "euthanasia is not being considered".
"We have faith and we will ensure he receives the maximum treatment in an effort to achieve results," he added.
The January 4 stroke signaled a dramatic end to the career of the former general who was on course at the time for re-election as the head of the newly-created Kadima party.
He was succeeded on a temporary basis by his close ally Ehud Olmert who subsequently led Kadima to a less than convincing victory in a March 28 general election.
Sharon called the election in November on the same day that he quit his long-time political home in the right-wing Likud party, fed up with battling hardliners who refused to forgive him for unilaterally pulling out of Gaza.
Doctors initially induced him into a coma but efforts to rouse him over the intervening period have been in vain despite initial responses to pain stimulus tests.
Sharon had garnered a reputation as an arch-hawk before he assumed the premiership.
At one stage, an official Israeli commission had declared him unfit for public office over his role in a massacre of Palestinians in two Beirut refugee camps that was carried out by Christian militiamen during Israel's 1982 invasion.
He was also largely blamed for sparking the second Palestinian uprising with a visit to Jerusalem's disputed Al-Aqsa mosque compound in September 2000.
However he managed to rewrite his reputation in international circles as a key to peace in the Middle East by ordering the first ever evacuation of Jews from occupied Palestinian territory last August.
Olmert is planning to pull tens of thousands of Jewish settlers out of the West Bank in his term of office in a move seen as a natural follow-up to Sharon's disengagement from Gaza.
In a speech to the US Congress last week, Olmert was at pains to pay tribute to Sharon whom he called "the legendary statesman and visionary".
"I pray, as I am sure you all do too, for his recovery," said Olmert.
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