Six weeks before his 78th birthday, in January 2006, Ariel Sharon suffered a debilitating stroke while serving as Israel’s prime minister.

His collapse was so sudden and complete that doctors at Hadassah University Hospital in Jerusalem advised his family that he should be allowed to die. Yet advanced medical care allowed him to live for another eight years – at least in the physical sense – and receive daily visits from his two sons, Gilad and Omri.

A Computerised Tomography (CT) scan, which uses X-rays to build a detailed image of the inside of a human body, found that Mr Sharon had suffered incurable brain damage from his stroke. The doctors responded by trying to minimise his suffering by placing him in a medically-induced coma.

His son, Gilad, later summarised the medical advice as: “Based on the CT scan, the game was over”.

However the two brothers insisted that their father must be kept alive. “I would never be able to forgive myself if we did not fight to the end,” wrote Gilad in a biography of his father, “Sharon: The Life of a Leader.”