was declared dead by physicians at Jerusalem's Hadassah Hospital before 1 p.m. Israeli time [6 a.m. EST], Middle East Newsline reported. Authorities have already been notified of the death, and a government announcement was expected to be issued over the next hour.

GoogleNews and YahooNews still have him in surgery.

While Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and televangelist Pat Robertson are rejoicing, Charles Krauthammer rightly calls this "A Calamity for Israel."

The stroke suffered by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon could prove to be one of the great disasters in the country's nearly 60-year history. As I write this, Sharon's condition remains uncertain, but the severity of his stroke makes it unlikely that he will survive, let alone return to power. That could be disastrous because Sharon represented, indeed embodied, the emergence of a rational, farsighted national idea that seemed poised in the coming elections to create a stable governing political center for the first time in decades.

[...]

Sharon's genius was to seize upon and begin implementing a third way. With a negotiated peace illusory and a Greater Israel untenable, he argued that the only way to security was a unilateral redrawing of Israel's boundaries by building a fence around a new Israel and withdrawing Israeli soldiers and settlers from the other side. The other side would become independent Palestine.

[...]

The problem is that the vehicle for this Sharonist centrism, his new Kadima Party, is only a few weeks old, has no institutional structure and is hugely dependent on the charisma of and public trust in Sharon.

To be sure, Kadima is not a one-man party. It immediately drew large numbers of defectors from the old left and right parties (Labor and Likud), including cabinet members and members of parliament. It will not collapse overnight. But Sharon's passing from the scene will weaken it in the coming March elections and will jeopardize its future. Sharon needed time, perhaps just a year or two, to rule the country as Kadima leader, lay down its institutional roots and groom a new generation of party leaders to take over after him.

This will not happen. There is no one in the country, let alone in his party, with his prestige and standing. Ehud Olmert, his deputy and now acting prime minister, is far less likely to score the kind of electoral victory that would allow a stable governing majority.

Kadima represents an idea whose time has come. But not all ideas whose time has come realize themselves. They need real historical actors to carry them through. Sharon was a historical actor of enormous proportion, having served in every one of Israel's wars since its founding in 1948, having almost single-handedly saved Israel with his daring crossing of the Suez Canal in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and now having broken Israel's left-right political duopoly that had left the country bereft of any strategic ideas to navigate the post-Oslo world. Sharon put Israel on the only rational strategic path out of that wreckage. But, alas, he had taken his country only halfway there when he himself was taken away. And he left no Joshua.

Sadly, no. Of course, Lyndon Johnson managed to make nearly unthinkable changes in the American political landscape using the ghost of John Kennedy. One hopes "Ariel Sharon would have wanted this" becomes a similarly effective tool in Israeli politics.

Hat tip: Shawn Wasson

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Update (1059): AP is running a story timestamped 1050 EST entitled, "Sharon's Brain Scan Shows Improvement."

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon showed "significant improvement" after five hours of emergency brain surgery Friday, and his intracranial pressure returned to normal, hospital officials said.

AP has a story timestamped 1044 EST entitled "Sharon's Recovery Becomes More Unlikely"

The chances of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon recovering from his massive stroke became even more remote Friday after doctors reported more bleeding in his brain. Surgeons operated on the 77-year-old premier again Friday for five hours in an effort to remove the latest blood clot and relieve swelling in his brain - life-threatening complications that, while not unexpected, make the prospect of survival ever slimmer, experts say. "It sounds like a last desperate attempt to salvage something, but the prognosis must now be terrible," said Dr. Anthony Rudd, a stroke specialist at St. Thomas' Hospital in London.

There was no word on Sharon's condition following the surgery. He was to undergo a brain scan.

Meanwhile, a Reuters report dated "7 minutes ago" is titled, "Surgeons stop Sharon's cranial bleeding: hospital."

Surgeons managed to stop new bleeding in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's brain in an emergency operation on Friday and he remains in critical but stable condition, a doctor said. "During the surgery the cranial pressure was released and some of the blood clots that remained from the previous surgery were drained. At the end of the operation there is no active bleeding," Dr. Shlomo Mor-Yosef, director of Jerusalem's Hadassah hospital, told reporters. He said Sharon's brain scan showed "significant improvement" compared with previous scans. But Mor-Yosef added: "His condition is still critical but stable."

[...]

Medical experts said that if Sharon pulled through, his faculties could be seriously impaired, making a return to work impossible. His deputy, Ehud Olmert, was named acting prime minister on Wednesday after Sharon fell ill. "This is the deadliest and most disabling form of stroke that we face," Dr. Stephan Mayer, associate professor of neurology and neurosurgery at Columbia University Medical Center in New York, told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Update (1245): In a piece GoogleNews dates "17 hours ago," Israeli Insider's Emanuel A. Winston writes,

An early report stated that Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is dead after suffering a massive stroke - a brain hemorrhage which resulted in a 7 hour brain surgery. Then his doctors put him into an "induced coma", that is, totally sedated with anesthetic - with machines maintaining his bodily functions. Later reports insisted that he was alive.

There is a state of "in-between" wherein the machinery available to us through modern science can keep the human body alive while the brain is dead. There is no question that, between heart/lung machines and other devices a comatose person can lay tranquilly in a bed, all pink and seemingly alive.

Certainly true.

Update (1556): By all accounts, Sharon is alive but in grave condition. World Tribune has removed the story from its front pages and the link above takes one to a sloppily-edited piece entitled, "Conflicting reports issued on Sharon's condition."

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