Sharon's name absent from Israel election list

JERUSALEM - Ariel Sharon's departure from Israel's political scene was made official by the absence of his name from the list of candidates for the March parliamentary election unveiled by the party he founded.

Sharon, incapacitated by a January 4 stroke, cannot run in the ballot because he could not sign a form to confirm his candidacy for the centrist Kadima, a party spokeswoman said.

It will be the first election in three decades in which Sharon, 77, has not run.

"All our hearts are with him," Israel's Interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who has assumed Sharon's duties, told a party rally in Jerusalem, kicking off a campaign for the March 28 election that Kadima is forecast by opinion polls to win.

He vowed to fulfil the goals Sharon had set, alluding to last year's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, a move whose wide popularity Sharon had sought to capitalise on when he quit the rightist Likud party in November to found Kadima.

Olmert said he would forge ahead with efforts to resolve Israel's conflict with the Palestinians, with a goal to "shape the permanent borders of the state of Israel as a country with a clear and solid Jewish majority".

He alluded to the electoral victory of Hamas militants who trounced the longtime dominant Fatah party in a January 25 Palestinian parliamentary poll.

"We are not sent into a panic by external threats nor the events of recent days," Olmert said. Israel has said it would refuse talks with a Palestinian government that included Hamas, a group committed to Israel's destruction.

Kadima had wanted to list Sharon as a candidate symbolically, despite his being in a coma in hospital, but could not do so, party spokeswoman Maya Jacobs said.

"He could not sign the form for joining Kadima, that is why he didn't get a spot," she said.

Of the 50 candidates announced, veteran statesman Shimon Peres was ranked number two behind Olmert, followed by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, a former Mossad intelligence agent.

Avi Dichter, a former security chief who masterminded Israeli assassinations of militant leaders in the past five years, took the number five spot, and Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz, the eighth.

- REUTERS