Arab govts largely silent on Sharon

Non-Arab Iran was swift to hail the fading health of the leader of its Israeli archfoe. Hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wished the "butcher" dead.

But nearly two days after a new stroke saw Sharon rushed to hospital, plunging Israeli politics into turmoil, most Arab regimes have kept quiet.

Even pro-Western Jordan and Egypt, the two Arab states that have signed peace treaties with Israel, have been slow to comment publicly on its leader's demise.

The Jordanian government said late Friday that it was concerned about the impact on the peace process.

"The Jordanian government continues to follow with interest the impact of the developments in the Israeli prime minister's state of health, particularly its effects on the Israeli and Palestinian scenes and the peace process," said government spokesman Nasser Jawdeh.

"The government hopes that the peace process will not be affected."

Egypt, whose President Hosni Mubarak has publicly praised Sharon as a man of peace, has yet to make any comment through government officials.

Israel's privately owned Channel 10 television reported that Mubarak had telephoned acting prime minister Ehud Olmert to express his concern for Sharon's recovery.

It was left to the government-owned media to voice Egyptian concerns about the post-Sharon future, and the possibility that it could see hawkish former premier Benjamin Netanyahu, returned to power.

"Should Sharon pass away, Netanyahu will almost certainly reclaim the premiership and we all know that he represents the most extremist wing in Likud," the state-owned Al-Akhbar daily said in an editorial.

The newspaper charged that Netanyahu, who was elected as leader of Sharon's old Likud party last month, was "hostile to peace and the pursuit of the peace process."

Mubarak had tense relations with Netanyahu when he served as premier between 1996 and 1999, accusing him of repeatedly failing to stand by his commitments.

"How can we trust a man who does not even respect his own signature?" Mubarak asked in 1997.

But independent newspapers in Cairo, like most of their counterparts around the Arab world, took a more critical line.

"The demise of the Sabra and Shatila butcher" was the headline of the opposition daily Al-Wafd, referring to massacres in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982 for which Sharon was found "indirectly responsible".

The Palestinian leadership, which, like Egypt, worked with Sharon's government on last year's pullout from Gaza, voiced concern about the "big vacuum" in Israeli politics following his demise.