Ariel Sharon, Former Israeli Prime Minister, Dies
A spokesman for the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv, where Sharon has been treated for most of the past eight years, gave the news Saturday. This follows an announcement made by the hospital last week that Sharon's condition had deteriorated sharply and his family was at his bedside.
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Yoram Ravid, a Sharon family friend, told Al Jazeera that the former PM would have a military funeral within 36 hours of his death and that it would be held near Sharon's ranch in the Negev Desert in southern Israel.
Sharon was a controversial figure while he was alive, nicknamed "the bulldozer" for his hard-line tactics and known for both his encouraging of tens of thousands of Israelis to move to settlements in the occupied West Bank and his unilateral withdrawal of troops and settlers from the similarly occupied Gaza Strip.
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