Warhorse soldiering on for peace

The high point in Ariel Sharon's rich military career came in the 1973 Yom Kippur war when he led his division through a gap in the Egyptian line and crossed the Suez Canal in a night action that reversed the tide of Israel's fiercest war.

The pinnacle of his political life came this year when he evacuated Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip in an effort to move his country towards peace, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

Controversy has marked the Israeli leader's career since he was a young army officer, but neither friend nor foe could have imagined that his most far-reaching initiative would come more than a decade after retirement age, when he proved capable of abandoning the political views of a lifetime.

Mr Sharon was born in 1928 as Ariel Scheinermann to a poor farmer in the centre of the country. His parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe but he grew up to typify the Israeli-born Sabra, not only adopting a Hebrew name but the self-confident, assertive, sometimes brash attitude of the New Jew prepared to fight for a Jewish state. At age 14, he joined a paramilitary youth battalion and later the Haganah, precursor to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). As a platoon commander in Israel's war of independence in 1948, he was severely wounded in the battle for the road leading to Jerusalem.

His daring and resourcefulness lifted him rapidly through the ranks of the army. In 1952, he was placed in command of an elite commando unit charged with carrying out raids across Israel's borders in retaliation for attacks by Palestinian militants. Mr Sharon came under sharp criticism in 1953 for an attack on the Jordanian village of Qibya in which 60 civilians were killed when the houses were blown up. The unit was disbanded and incorporated into Israel's first paratroop battalion, also headed by Mr Sharon.

His over-aggressiveness was manifested again in the 1956 Suez campaign against Egypt, when he defied orders and attacked Egyptian forces commanding a pass in Sinai, a superfluous battle in which dozens of his men were killed.

Mr Sharon nevertheless reached the rank of major-general and in the 1967 Six-Day war staged what military experts would term the most brilliant set-piece battle ever waged by the Israeli army.