Ariel Sharon
Ariel Sharon was an Israeli general and prime minister who spent his career expanding settlements and ended it withdrawing from Gaza. Born in 1928 in a moshav north of Tel Aviv to Belarusian immigrant parents, he joined the Haganah as a teenager and was badly wounded at Latrun in the 1948 war. In 1953 he formed Unit 101, a commando force that carried out reprisal raids. The attack on Qibya in October 1953 destroyed forty-five houses and killed sixty-nine Jordanian villagers, about half of them women and children, and was condemned internationally. He commanded a paratroop brigade at the Mitla Pass in 1956 and an armoured division in the Sinai in 1967. His reputation was made in October 1973, when he crossed the Suez Canal against orders and encircled the Egyptian Third Army, turning the war. He entered politics and helped found Likud in 1973. As agriculture minister and then defence minister he drove settlement construction in the West Bank and Gaza, which he regarded as the decisive means of preventing a Palestinian state. He planned the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, extending it to Beirut beyond what the cabinet had approved. In September, Israeli-allied Phalangist militia massacred between 800 and 3,500 people in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps under Israeli military control. The Kahan Commission found him personally responsible for not preventing it and he was forced to resign as defence minister. His visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000 preceded the second intifada. He became prime minister in 2001, built the West Bank barrier, and then in 2005 withdrew all settlers and soldiers from Gaza, splitting Likud to form Kadima. He suffered a massive stroke in January 2006 and died in 2014.
- Lived: 1928 CE – 2014 CE
- Nationality: Israeli
- Roles: Prime Minister of Israel (2001–06)
