Sharon’s chances promising

JERUSALEM – Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is no longer in immediate danger of dying, doctors announced Tuesday, detailing further improvement in his condition following a massive stroke last week.

“Metaphorically speaking, we were right on the edge of a cliff,” Yoram Weiss, an anesthesiologist working on Sharon’s case, told reporters at a news conference Tuesday evening. “Now we’ve eased back five meters from the edge.”

While Sharon remained incapacitated, the acting prime minister, Ehud Olmert, spoke by phone with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and outlined a proposal to allow Palestinians in East Jerusalem to cast ballots in the Jan. 25 election of a new Palestinian legislature. Israel has banned voting in East Jerusalem, citing the participation of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, in national elections for the first time.

Israeli officials said Olmert told Rice he would permit the estimated 120,000 Palestinians eligible to cast ballots in the city to do so either outside municipal boundaries or at designated post offices inside them. But Olmert said he would not allow Hamas to appear on the ballot. The organization, which does not recognize Israel, is projected to win between 30 to 40 percent of the vote. The Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, whose governing Fatah Party is threatened politically by Hamas, has said he would cancel the election if Israel prohibits voting in the city, although it was unclear Tuesday if he would accept the Israeli compromise.

Despite the generally positive report on Sharon’s condition, doctors said it was too soon to tell whether he has suffered lasting brain damage from the stroke and the extensive bleeding that followed. The assessment was encouraging that Sharon, 77, will survive the brain trauma, but his return to office remained improbable.

Doctors were engaged in the delicate process of reviving Sharon from a medically induced coma. Doctors said the staged procedure would take several more days to complete.