Obituary: Divisive political and military figure (Ariel Sharon)reversed his hardline stance to oversee the Israeli pull-out from Gaza as PM


The late Ariel Sharon

Ariel Sharon, who has died aged 85, was for decades one of Israel's most controversial figures. 

Long the darling of the far-right, Sharon angered Arabs and Israeli doves by championing Jewish settlement on land taken in the 1967 Middle East war. 

The Arab world reviled Sharon for masterminding the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, during which Israel's Lebanese Christian allies massacred Palestinians in two refugee camps.

Sharon was forced to resign as defence minister after an Israeli inquiry found him indirectly responsible for failing to prevent the killings.

His provocative visit to Islam's third holiest site, al-Haram al-Sharif (The Noble Sanctuary), while opposition leader, was said to have sparked the second Palestinian intifada (uprising) in September 2000.

Sharon shocked Jewish ultranationalists in 2003 by announcing he would "disengage" Israel from fighting with the Palestinians by removing all 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip and four from the occupied West Bank.

SOURCE: aljazeera.com

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