Ariel Sharon

Biography

Ariel Sharon was born in 1928 in the moshav of Kfar Malal in Mandatory Palestine to immigrants from the Russian Empire. He fought with the Haganah and as a platoon commander in the 1948 war, where he was badly wounded at Latrun, and later studied at the Hebrew University and took a law degree at Tel Aviv University.

In 1953 he founded and led Unit 101, whose reprisal raids included the Qibya massacre, and he went on to command paratroopers in the Suez crisis and to fight in the Six-Day War, the War of Attrition and the 1973 war. On leaving the army he joined Likud and entered the Knesset.

As agriculture minister and in later housing and infrastructure posts he promoted settlement building in the occupied territories. As defence minister he directed the 1982 invasion of Lebanon; the Kahan Commission found him personally responsible for disregarding the danger of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, and he had to leave the defence ministry.

Sharon became Likud leader in 1999, and his visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000 helped set off the Second Intifada. Elected prime minister in February 2001, he built the West Bank barrier and carried out the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, then left Likud to found Kadima. A stroke in January 2006 left him in a coma until his death in 2014.