By Rafael D. Frankel
JERUSALEM - Anxious Israelis were glued to their televisions last night for updates on the condition of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Perhaps no figure alive today represents the State of Israel more than Sharon, a legendary war hero who won countless battles and later led the country as prime minister through the hell of the second Palestinian intifadeh.
The hospital caring for him was inundated with goodwill messages from around Israel and the world.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas wished Sharon a speedy recovery. So did the White House, which conveyed get-well wishes through U.S. Ambassador Elliott Abrams.
But in the Gaza Strip, some Palestinians fired rifles in the air and handed out candy in celebration, shouting, "Death to Sharon." Some ultrarightist Jews, who feel Sharon betrayed the settlement cause by pulling Israelis from Gaza, also prayed that he would die.
Sharon's health will likely become an issue as he fights to keep his job.
"Whether Sharon's aides like it or not, the health of the prime minister has just become the primary issue of this election and the greatest threat to Sharon's continued reign," Jerusalem Post columnist Gil Hoffman wrote today.
Born in pre-state Palestine to poor Polish immigrants in 1928, Sharon ascended the ranks of the army and politics by preaching force and showing strength, earning him his nickname “the bulldozer.”
Sharon led troops in every one of Israel’s wars. In his most daring and famous military maneuver, the major-general led the Israeli charge across the Suez Canal which shattered the Egyptian army and brought the 1973 War to an end.
His most controversial moment came when he was forced to resign as defense minister in 1983 after an internal Israeli investigation found him indirectly responsible for the massacre of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon.
Sharon spent the next two decades in the Likud party which he helped to form, all the while pushing the construction of Jewish settlements in territory Palestinians claim as theirs.
Elected as prime minister in Feb. 2001 after the outbreak of the second intifada months earlier, Sharon brought his hard-line tactics to bear on Palestinian terror groups and former Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat. He is widely credited in Israel with drastically reducing the suicide bombings and other attacks by Palestinian terrorists which killed over 1,000 Israelis since 2000.
Lately though, the 77-year-old Sharon changed course by removing Jewish settlers from the Gaza strip and forming a new centrist political party while expressing the desire to reach a final peace agreement with the Palestinians.
©2005 The New York Daily News and Rafael D. Frankel
Sunday, December 18, 2005
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Bronx hosp to perform free heart ops for Iraqi kids
'It's above our imagination what people are doing to help us'
BY RAFAEL D. FRANKEL in Amman, Jordan
and PAUL H.B. SHIN in New York
DAILY NEWS WRITERS
A group of desperately ill Iraqi children who won't make it to adulthood without heart surgeries are en route to New York today for the lifesaving operations.
Their remarkable journey from despair to hope will take the children from a war-torn country in dire need of expert medical care to the charitable hands of surgeons at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.
"It's above our imagination what people are doing to help us," said Saleh Abed, father of 14-year-old Assad, whose congenital heart defect has so stunted his growth that even at 14, his legs dangle from his chair.
"We can't believe people like this exist," Assad's father said yesterday after he and four other kids and their dads made the treacherous crossing to Amman, Jordan, where they are to get a flight to Kennedy Airport. They will arrive in New York tomorrow.
Assad was honest about his trepidations. "I can say I'm brave, but when it comes to surgery I'm a coward," said the boy who has lived with war for the past three years.
The operations for the five kids, four boys and one girl ages 7 to 14, was sponsored by the Gift of Life, a Long Island-based charity.
Unfortunately, two of the children may have to stay behind, one due to problems obtaining a visa and another because he may be too frail for the long flight, officials said.
The kids' fathers expressed overwhelming gratitude to the charity, as well as U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Marikay Satryano and Iraqi businesswoman May Hashim, who helped arrange the trip.
Despite their gratitude, all but one of the dads kept the trip to the U.S. a secret from everyone except their immediate families and ordered them to keep quiet about it.
"We're afraid to be targeted" by anti-American insurgents, said Abed, a policeman in the Sadr City slum of Baghdad.
Ali Abed-Ali, 14, suffers from a heart defect that no doctor in Iraq could treat, and last summer, his father, Hussein, had become desperate.
"I couldn't find help anywhere," he said, glancing at his son. "Even our family said it was pointless to keep on searching and spending money."
But then they got a phone call from the Iraqi Assistance Center, an American-government sponsored organization based in Baghdad, telling him Ali was among a pool of 200 children being considered for fully funded heart surgery at Montefiore.
After two medical screenings, Abed-Ali said the desperation had turned into a belief that the dream of his son growing up "could come true."
Abed-Ali was still waiting for a U.S. travel visa yesterday.
"I believe none of the children would live into adulthood without repair," said Dr. Samuel Weinstein, the pediatric cardio-thoracic surgeon who will be operating on the kids next week.
"Technically, I'm very confident that our team here will be able to take care of everything that they're confronted with," Weinstein said. But the fact that the children have lived with these conditions untreated for so long could complicate things.
"We just want to give these kids the opportunity of life that they otherwise would not have," said Bill Currie, a board member at the Gift of Life, which has saved about 8,000 sick children in 30 years.
©2005 The New York Daily News
BY RAFAEL D. FRANKEL in Amman, Jordan
and PAUL H.B. SHIN in New York
DAILY NEWS WRITERS
A group of desperately ill Iraqi children who won't make it to adulthood without heart surgeries are en route to New York today for the lifesaving operations.
Their remarkable journey from despair to hope will take the children from a war-torn country in dire need of expert medical care to the charitable hands of surgeons at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.
"It's above our imagination what people are doing to help us," said Saleh Abed, father of 14-year-old Assad, whose congenital heart defect has so stunted his growth that even at 14, his legs dangle from his chair.
"We can't believe people like this exist," Assad's father said yesterday after he and four other kids and their dads made the treacherous crossing to Amman, Jordan, where they are to get a flight to Kennedy Airport. They will arrive in New York tomorrow.
Assad was honest about his trepidations. "I can say I'm brave, but when it comes to surgery I'm a coward," said the boy who has lived with war for the past three years.
The operations for the five kids, four boys and one girl ages 7 to 14, was sponsored by the Gift of Life, a Long Island-based charity.
Unfortunately, two of the children may have to stay behind, one due to problems obtaining a visa and another because he may be too frail for the long flight, officials said.
The kids' fathers expressed overwhelming gratitude to the charity, as well as U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Marikay Satryano and Iraqi businesswoman May Hashim, who helped arrange the trip.
Despite their gratitude, all but one of the dads kept the trip to the U.S. a secret from everyone except their immediate families and ordered them to keep quiet about it.
"We're afraid to be targeted" by anti-American insurgents, said Abed, a policeman in the Sadr City slum of Baghdad.
Ali Abed-Ali, 14, suffers from a heart defect that no doctor in Iraq could treat, and last summer, his father, Hussein, had become desperate.
"I couldn't find help anywhere," he said, glancing at his son. "Even our family said it was pointless to keep on searching and spending money."
But then they got a phone call from the Iraqi Assistance Center, an American-government sponsored organization based in Baghdad, telling him Ali was among a pool of 200 children being considered for fully funded heart surgery at Montefiore.
After two medical screenings, Abed-Ali said the desperation had turned into a belief that the dream of his son growing up "could come true."
Abed-Ali was still waiting for a U.S. travel visa yesterday.
"I believe none of the children would live into adulthood without repair," said Dr. Samuel Weinstein, the pediatric cardio-thoracic surgeon who will be operating on the kids next week.
"Technically, I'm very confident that our team here will be able to take care of everything that they're confronted with," Weinstein said. But the fact that the children have lived with these conditions untreated for so long could complicate things.
"We just want to give these kids the opportunity of life that they otherwise would not have," said Bill Currie, a board member at the Gift of Life, which has saved about 8,000 sick children in 30 years.
©2005 The New York Daily News