Who is Ariel Sharon?

Ariel Sharon joined the Haganah in 1942.

In 1953, he founded and led the "101" special commando unit which carried out retaliatory operations.

The massacre in the West Bank village of Qibya, on October 14, 1953, was perhaps the most notorious. His troops blew up 45 houses and 69 Palestinian civilians --about half of them women and children-- were killed. The U.S. Department of State issued a statement on 18 October 1953, expressing its “deepest sympathy for the families of those who lost their lives” in the Qibya attack as well as the conviction that those responsible “should be brought to account and that effective measures should be taken to prevent such incidents in the future”.

Sharon was appointed commander of a paratroop brigade in 1956 and fought in the Sinai Campaign.

Under his commands, the Israeli paratroopers killed about 270 Egyptian prisoners of war during the 1956 Anglo-French campaign to take the Suez Canal. In all, 273 Egyptians, some of them Sudanese civilian road workers, were killed in three separate incidents, according to the accounts.

In 1969 he was appointed Head of the IDF Southern Command.

In August 1971 alone, troops under Mr Sharon's command destroyed some 2,000 homes in the Gaza Strip, uprooting 12,000 Palestinian refugees for the second time in their lives. Hundreds of young Palestinian men were arrested and deported to Jordan and Lebanon. Six hundred relatives of suspected guerrillas were exiled to Sinai. In the second half of 1971, 104 guerrillas were assassinated.

In 1981, Sharon was appointed Defense Minister, serving in this post during the Lebanon War.

As minister of defense in 1982, Sharon orchestrated Israel's invasion of Lebanon, a military operation that killed tens of thousands of civilians.

According to the statistics published in the Third World Quarterly (Vol. 6, Issue 4, Oct. 1984, pp. 934-949), over 29,500 Palestinians and Lebanese were either killed or wounded from 4 July 1982 through to 15 August 1982, 40% were children.

Massacre of Sabra and Shatila (1982)

Ariel Sharon is responsible for the massacre of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, on the southern outskirts of Beirut. The slaughter in the two contiguous camps at Sabra and Shatila took place from the evening of Sep 16, 1982 until the morning of Sep 18, 1982, in an area under the control of the Israeli armed forces. The perpetrators were members of the Phalange (Kata'e) militia, the Lebanese force that was armed by and closely allied with Israel since the onset of Lebanon's civil war in 1975. Prior to the massacre, Sharon had meetings with the Phalange forces.

For over 60 hours -- aided by an Israeli siege around the camps and guided by the light of Israeli flares -- forces belonging to the Israeli-allied Phalangist militia went through the camps, killing Palestinian and Lebanese civilians. Some were lined up against walls and mown down by machine-gun fire. Others were left in heaps on the floors of their homes or on the streets of the camps. Children were shot dead, women and girls were raped and mutilated and men were disemboweled prior to being executed.

The precise number of victims of the massacre may never be exactly determined. The International Committee of the Red Cross counted 1,500 at the time of the massacre but by September 22 this count had risen to 2,400. On the following day 350 bodies were uncovered so that the total then ascertained had reached 2,750. Israeli military intelligence estimated that 700 to 800 were killed.

A Jewish-American registered nurse, Ms. Ellen Siegel, was working in Gaza hospital in the Sabra refugee camp in Beirut, where she and a medical team treated the first victims of the massacre. She and other health workers were lined up against a bullet-riddled wall by Phalangists who were about to execute them, with rifles aimed, when an Israeli officer came running to stop this possible execution.

official Israeli commission of inquiry

-- chaired by Yitzhak Kahan, president of Israel's Supreme Court -- investigated the massacre, and in February 1983 publicly released its findings. The Kahan Commission found that Ariel Sharon, among other Israelis, had responsibility for the massacre, although it carefully sidestepped any accusation of direct involvement in the massacre and chose not to attempt to reconcile much of the contradictory testimony.

In 1990-1992, he served as Minister of Construction and Housing. Following the fall of the Soviet Union and the waves of immigration from Russia, he initiated and carried out a program to absorb the immigrants including the construction of 144,000 apartments.

Sharon was a key player in the settlement explosion throughout the 1977-1992 Likud-era of Israeli government. This period was characterized by more land confiscation and more settlement activity than had ever been seen before in Israeli history. The number of settlers in the Occupied Palestinian Territories increased by over two thousand percent during this period, to approximately 110,000 people.

In 1996, Ariel Sharon was appointed Minister of National Infrastructure and was involved in fostering joint ventures with Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinians.

Yet again, Sharon was in charge of settlement construction. In the post-Oslo period, Israel established 30 new settlements and thus nearly doubled the settler population in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from 109,000 in 1993 to nearly 200,000 in 1999.

In 1998 Ariel Sharon was appointed Foreign Minister and charged with conducting negotiations towards a final agreement with the Palestinian Authority. He accompanied P.M. Netanyahu to the Wye River Plantation as chief negotiator.

Sharon's concept of “advancing the peace process” remained somewhat flawed during this period. According to an Agence France Presse report of 15 November 1998, while addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Foreign Minister Sharon stated:

“Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now ... Everything we don't grab will go to them.”

Sep, 28, 2000, sparking off the Second Palestinian Intifada

Only four months before his election, the ever-confrontational Sharon visited Al-Haram Ash-Sharif on 28 September 2000 and sparked off the Second Palestinian Intifada that has so far seen 1309 Palestinians killed up to April 7th 2002, according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society.

Sharon’s visit to the third holiest site in Islam, guarded by -- according to the most conservative reports -- 1,000 armed Israeli soldiers, was overtly designed to demonstrate Israel's “sovereignty” over Jerusalem, especially over the Al-Haram Ash-Sharif provoke an angry response. It was also intended to impress the right wing of the Israeli public, who later castigated Labour Prime Minister Barak for his “restraint” in the face of the Palestinian uprising by electing Sharon, who sparked it off.

On February 6, 2001, Ariel Sharon was elected Prime Minister.

The rest of Mr. Sharon’s Biography is very clear to the people all around the world. Tanks surrounding the main cities and refugee camps and bombing the civilians. Occupying soldiers prevent food and medicine from the civilian population. Ambulances are targeted and prevented from saving wounded people. Dead bodies everywhere and no one is able to bury them. Buildings and homes are destroyed. Arms are smuggled. Unarmed civilian population fights one of the most powerful armies in the world. Tears are in every eye. Funerals are every in every house in the land of Peace. A complete silence from everyone and unlimited support to the Israeli aggression.