Sharon Breathing Independently, Doctors Say

The Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, today began breathing on his own after doctors started to slowly bring him out of an induced coma.

A hospital official said Mr Sharon had started breathing independently as soon as doctors began to reduce his level of sedation this morning. They are determining the extent of brain damage following his major stroke last week.

The director of the Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem, Shlomo Mor-Yosef, said: "The moment we began reducing the dosage, the prime minister began breathing independently."

However, Dr Mor-Yosef stressed that 77-year-old Mr Sharon remained in a critical condition and was still attached to life support machines. He said the process of reducing the prime minister's anaesthetic could take hours or days.

Doctors said the damage to his brain could range from some impairment to physical and mental functioning to spending the rest of his life in a permanent vegetative state. They have said there is almost no chance that he will be fit enough to return to work.

A formal assessment to that effect would oblige the attorney general, Menachem Mazuz, to declare the prime minister unfit for office and require the cabinet to elect a successor.

The immediate successor is almost certain to be Ehud Olmert - now serving as the acting prime minister - after potential challengers including the former prime minister Shimon Peres threw their support behind him yesterday.

The cabinet is expected to confirm that Mr Olmert will head the government until general elections take place in March.

That would move Israeli politics out of a limbo in which electioneering has been suspended out of respect for Mr Sharon, and towards reconstructing the leadership of Kadima, the new party he founded late last year.

Mr Sharon complained of feeling unwell while staying at his ranch in the Negev desert last Wednesday evening. He developed a cerebral haemorrhage - also known as a bleeding stroke - during his hour-long ambulance journey to Jerusalem.

Yesterday, his neurosurgeon, Jose Cohen, said the chances the prime minister would survive were "very high" but warned that he had suffered some cognitive damage.

"He will not continue to be prime minister, but maybe he will be able to understand and to speak," Mr Cohen said.

Dr Mor-Yosef, however, was more cautious, saying a brain scan yesterday showed the swelling had reduced but doctors were still working to save Mr Sharon.

"I can't yet say that the prime minister is out of danger, but there are slight signs of an improvement. We are fighting to save his life," he said.

At the opening of the weekly cabinet meeting yesterday, Mr Olmert sought to reassure Israelis there would be continuity.

"If I could speak with him this morning and ask: 'Arik [Sharon], what would you tell us? What would you want us to do?' he would say: 'I appreciate the fact that you are all concerned about my health. Thank you, but get to work. You must continue running affairs of state and doing everything to take care of security and socio-economic issues.' And this is what we will continue to do."

Later, Mr Olmert said he prayed his tenure as acting prime minister would be short and that Mr Sharon would return as leader. But few Israelis now expect that to happen, and the interest in the prime minister's condition appears mostly to be humanitarian concern.

Speaking outside the Hadassah hospital this morning, Lord Janner of Braunstone, a leading figure in Britain's Jewish community, said he was there to express hope for the "complete recovery ... [of] this great man".