Former Israeli premier criminal Ariel Sharon will be buried on Monday afternoon, Zionist media outlets announced.
Former Israeli premier criminal Ariel Sharon will be buried on Monday afternoon, Zionist media outlets announced.
The 85-year-old assassin died in hospital near Tel Aviv Saturday after eight years in a coma because of a massive hemorrhagic stroke.
Ariel Sharon, the Butcher
Born in 1928 to Belarussian parents on a Jewish collective settlement in the British Mandate of Palestine, Sharon joined a Zionist militia in the 1940s to take part in the movement to create a Jewish state.
Sharon participated in military campaigns led by the Haganah, which famously devised Plan Dalet, a template for the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in order to create a Jewish majority in what was to become "Israel."
Following independence, Sharon joined the infamous Unit 101 of the Israeli army, where he led covert cross-border operations against civilian and military targets in the Jordanian-occupied West Bank.
In October 1953, Sharon led a squad on a raid into the village of Qibya, blowing up houses and throwing grenades at random into residential neighborhoods. The raid, which would come to be called the Qibya Massacre, killed 69 civilians, two-thirds of them women and children, and provoked international outrage.
Sharon then moved into politics, and he became a major force behind the establishment of the right-wing Likud party. He was an early advocate of the movement that advocated Jewish colonization of the territories captured in 1967.
From the beginning of the settlement movement, he promoted efforts to take over Arab-owned lands and give them to Jews, with the intent of preventing Arabs who had fled from returning.
After success in the 1981 elections, Sharon was appointed minister of defense, a role that would earn him international notoriety as he presided over the bloody Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
The invasion was brutal and killed around 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians.
In the most notorious episode of Sharon's career, he presided over and facilitated the massacre of around 3,500 unarmed Palestinian civilians in Sabra and Shatila in southern Beirut by Israeli-supported Lebanese Forces militias.
Israeli forces who controlled the area surrounded the camp and lit flares during the night to help militants navigate alleyways as they slaughtered residents.
Sharon was a principle architect of the settlement movement, using his positions as minister of housing and national infrastructure among others to facilitate the construction of a vast apparatus of illegal settlements on occupied lands in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights in Syria.
In 1998, Sharon told a meeting of the right-wing Tzomet party that "Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours. ... Everything we don't grab will go to them."
In September 2000, amid rising anger in the Palestinian territories over continuing settlement construction and the breakdown of "peace talks," Sharon toured the Al-Aqsa compound in occupied Jerusalem accompanied by 1,000 security forces.
The visit led to mass protests, while violent Israeli repressions of these protests fueled into widespread public anger at Israel's failure to abide by its responsibilities according to the "peace talks" and end the occupation.
The days that followed marked a major escalation of the Palestinian national resistance against Israel, and unleashed waves of fury and violence against both the Israeli military and civilians that became known as the Second Intifada.
