Olmert to carry on as acting leader
Attorney General Meni Mazuz is expected to notify Ehud Olmert today that he will continue to serve as acting prime minister through Israel’s elections, the Justice Ministry said, as Israeli leader Ariel Sharon remained in a coma.
Mazuz will continue to define Sharon as temporarily, rather than permanently incapacitted because doctors treating the prime minister at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital have not yet offered a prognosis, the Haaretz daily reported today.
A declaration of permanent incapacitation, which would require the Cabinet to name a successor to Sharon, would be irreversible.
Hospital spokesman Ron Krumer today said that Sharon’s condition – critical but stable – remained unchanged.
Although Sharon has failed to waken since doctors began lifting his heavy sedation nearly a week ago, Channel 1 TV has cited one of his neurosurgeons as saying he was optimistic the prime minister would emerge from his coma by early this week.
Some outside experts, however, say the persistent coma suggests prospects for recovery are dim.
Sharon’s abrupt departure from the political stage threw Israel and the Mideast into turmoil because he was seen as the Israeli politician most capable of negotiating peace with the Palestinians.
Olmert, Sharon’s ally and a proponent of further territorial concessions to the Palestinians, is seen as the prime minister’s likely political heir and has quietly been easing the turbulence created by Sharon’s illness.
In his first major political test, he is expected to steer today’s meeting of the Cabinet to approve Palestinian voting in disputed east Jerusalem.
Jerusalem is the epicentre of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict, with both sides claiming the city as its capital.
Israel initially had planned to bar Palestinian voting in east Jerusalem because candidates from the armed Hamas group were to appear on the ballot – a stand that provoked Palestinian threats to cancel the election because of Jerusalem’s symbolic significance.
But last week, Israel reversed course after coming under pressure from the US , which is eager to promote democratic processes in the region.
According to the compromise proposal that the Cabinet is to vote, elections in Jerusalem would go ahead, but members of armed groups like Hamas, which call for Israel’s destruction, wouldn’t be allowed to run.
Hamas is expected to make a strong showing in the overall balloting and possibly dominate parliament, having been bolstered by its clean-hands image and growing violence in Palestinian-run areas in recent months.
With the east Jerusalem voting crisis headed for resolution, Olmert faces another mmediate test – a stand-off with Jewish settlers in the volatile West Bank city of Hebron, where 500 settlers live among 160,000 Palestinians.
Eight settler families have been given until today to evacuate a neighbourhood they took over four years ago. They are to be removed forcibly in a month’s time if they disregard the evacuation order, as they are expected to do.
Elsewhere in the West Bank, Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian mother and her armed son early today in what appeared to be a mix up sparked by a feud between villagers, residents said.
Soldiers, apparently thinking they had come across a militant hideout, fired at a house on the outskirts of the village of Rojib where 20-year-old Fawzi Dwekat was standing guard with a rifle in the wake of arson attacks on the family’s cars, residents said.
The shots killed the man and his 50-year-old mother, Nawal, who had rushed up to the roof with other family members after hearing gunfire, they said.
Residents said soldiers shot first, and Dwekat returned fire.
