Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon began breathing on his own yesterday, the first positive sign as doctors tried to rouse him from a medically induced coma to assess brain damage from a massive stroke. “He is still connected to respirators that help him but the prime minister is breathing spontaneously,” Shlomo Mor-Yosef, director of Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital, told reporters.

As Israelis kept anxious vigil for the 77-year-old leader many had seen as the best hope for resolving their conflict with the Palestinians, Sharon’s medical team gradually began reducing his sedation to help him regain consciousness. The process is critical for determining the extent Sharon’s faculties have been impaired and his chances for survival, though outside experts say there is no guarantee he will awaken from anaesthesia. But only a hour after doctors began weaning Sharon off drugs that have kept in an induced coma since suffering the stroke on Wednesday, they reported he had begun taking breaths.

“This is one stage, a first stage,” Mor-Yosef said. But he said Sharon remained in critical condition. Sharon’s surgeons say there is a good chance he will live. But medical consensus is he has suffered too much damage to ever return to politics, an arena he has dominated in recent years like no figure since founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.

The loss of Sharon, an ex-general who raised peace hopes by pulling settlers and troops out of Gaza in September to end 38 years of military rule, would create a huge void in the Middle East peace process. Sharon has been in an induced coma and on a respirator to aid his healing since suffering the stroke on Wednesday. The decision to press ahead with efforts to revive him came after a series of operations that stopped cranial bleeding.

As Sharon is weaned off sedation, neurosurgeons will be looking for his response to voices and other stimuli, from the movement of fingers to the opening of eyes. “The best news would be if Sharon wakes up, (a doctor) tells him ‘squeeze my hand’, and he does,” Dr. Azriel Perl, a senior Tel Aviv anaesthetist who was not treating the prime minister, told the Maariv newspaper’s NRG news Web site.

However, if doctors determine Sharon is permanently incapacitated, they will pass on their finding to Israel’s attorney general. The cabinet would then choose a prime minister from ministers of Sharon’s new centrist Kadima party. Sharon’s deputy, Ehud Olmert, has already taken over as acting prime minister, and would be expected to keep the job in the run-up to a general election already scheduled for March 28.

<I>“The loss of Sharon would create a huge void in the Middle East peace process.”</I>

Olmert projected a message of business as usual on Sunday in televised remarks at the weekly cabinet meeting and at a news conference in which he promised continued economic stability. Sitting next to Sharon’s vacant chair at the cabinet table, Olmert pledged to “run matters as he would have wished”. Throughout Israel, radios and televisions were tuned to news broadcasts as Israelis anxiously followed Sharon’s fate.

Normally fractious Israeli politicians observed a self-imposed moratorium on in-fighting. World leaders have pledged support for Olmert as he stands in for Sharon. Sharon is reviled in the Arab world but increasingly seen by the West as having opened up new prospects for peace. He suffered the stroke at a crucial juncture as he was fighting for re-election on a promise to end conflict with the Palestinians.

Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurie voiced wishes for Sharon’s recovery. However, reflecting tension over Sharon’s tough handling of a five-year-old Palestinian uprising, he expressed hope the outcome would be “for the good of the peace process and not bring more oppression”. Political analysts said Israel’s March election, which Sharon had been widely expected to win as head of the Kadima party, would become an open race without him.

Matt SPETALNICK</B>