JERUSALEM – The Israeli Cabinet yesterday formally ended the five-year tenure of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who has been comatose since suffering a stroke in January, designating acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as his successor.
The appointment will go into effect at midnight Friday, 100 days after Sharon's stroke, when the 78-year-old leader will be categorized as permanently incapacitated under Israeli law.
The Cabinet decision was made yesterday because of the weeklong Passover holiday, which begins today.
Sharon's powers had been transferred to Olmert, who was serving as his deputy, immediately after the prime minister suffered a stroke Jan. 4.
Olmert will serve as acting prime minister until he forms a new government, following the plurality his centrist Kadima Party won in the March 28 election.
Also yesterday, Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz threatened to step up Israeli responses to rocket attacks by Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip, a day after a Palestinian girl was killed by an Israeli artillery shell.
The girl was killed and several other children were wounded when a shell slammed into her family's house in Beit Lahiya. The girl's mother was critically injured.
The army said it was responding to rocket fire from the neighborhood, but the girl's father told Israel Radio yesterday that no rockets were fired from the vicinity of the family house.
At the Palestinian-controlled Rafah border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, special forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas took over without incident from troops under the control of the Interior Ministry, which is headed by a minister from the militant group Hamas.
Abbas had been under international pressure to assert control of the border crossing.
