Celebrated as a military hero at home, recognised as a pragmatic politician abroad and despised as a bloodthirsty criminal by the Palestinians and the Arab world, Sharon was nothing if not a polarising figure.
But Israelis of all stripes acknowledged the burly 85-year-old as a key figure in their nation's history, his death on Saturday leaving President Shimon Peres as the Jewish state's last surviving founding father.
The white-haired former general had been in coma since January 4, 2006, following a massive stroke which felled him at the height of his political career.
Ahead of his funeral on Monday, Sharon's flag-draped coffin was placed on a black marble plinth in the plaza outside the Knesset, or parliament, for the public to pay their last respects.
A spokesman for the assembly told AFP up to 20,000 people had filed past the coffin, which was flanked by an honour guard,  when the plaza was closed to the public after seven hours.
Among the visitors were people of all ages, soldiers and black-clad ultra-Orthodox Jews rubbing shoulders with families.
Earlier, ministers held a minute's silence in memory of Israel's 11th prime minister as they met for their weekly cabinet meeting.
"He will be remembered in the heart of the Jewish people forever as one of our most outstanding leaders and most daring commanders," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told them.
Funeral at ranch near Gaza
Sharon will be buried on Monday afternoon at Sycamore Ranch, his home in the southern Negev desert, after a military funeral
A procession from the Knesset to the ranch will stop pause for a ceremony at a military memorial site in Latrun, west of Jerusalem, where Sharon was wounded in the 1948 war of independence.
With thousands of people expected to attend the funeral, police were preparing to deploy extra units to secure the area, which lies just a few kilometres (miles) from the northern border with Gaza.
Channel 2 television said the army had changed the deployment of the Iron Dome aerial defence system batteries in the area to defend against possible rocket attacks from Gaza. A military spokeswoman refused to comment.
World leaders sent condolences over Sharon's death, remembering the divisive figure in cautious diplomatic language. Vice President Joe Biden is expected to represent Washington at a special memorial at the Knesset on Monday morning.
Others expected to attend are German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, outgoing Czech Prime Minister Jiri Rusnok and Middle East Quartet envoy Tony Blair as well as diplomats from Canada, Spain and Russia.
Sharon's dramatic story was the subject of blanket media coverage on Sunday, with Israeli newspapers dedicating multiple pages to pictures and commentary on his life and legacy.
Once known chiefly as a ruthless military leader who fought in all of Israel's major wars, Sharon switched to politics in 1973, championing the development of Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.
He was long considered a pariah for his personal but "indirect" responsibility in the 1982 massacre of hundreds of Palestinians by Israel's Lebanese Phalangist allies in Beirut's Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
His early career as a warrior earned him the moniker "The Bulldozer" but most world leaders chose to remember the politician who surprised many by masterminding Israel's pullout from Gaza in 2005.
The Palestinians were quick to welcome news of his death, which prompted an outburst of celebration in the Gaza Strip, where the ruling Islamist Hamas movement said it was a "historic moment" marking the "disappearance of a criminal whose hands were covered with Palestinian blood".
One of the last members of the generation that founded the Jewish state in 1948, Sharon leaves a complex legacy which also includes the sprawling barrier separating Israel from the West Bank.
His policy of separation from the Palestinians culminated in the withdrawal of 8,000 settlers from Gaza, a bold move that earned him the hatred of his former nationalist and settler allies.
Born in British-mandate Palestine on February 26, 1928, to immigrants from Belarus, Sharon was just 17 when he joined the Haganah, the militia that fought in the 1948 war of independence

Reuters reported that Human rights lawyers and campaigners have asked the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate allegations of torture by British troops in Iraq, a move which the UK government dismissed as unnecessary on Sunday.
A Berlin-based human rights group and a British law firm have submitted what they describe as 250 pages of analysis to the ICC's Office of the Prosecutor requesting action on alleged abuses between 2003 and 2008.
The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) and Public Interest Lawyers (PIL) said in a press release posted on the ECCHR website that there had been "systemic abuse" of Iraqi detainees during the British presence in Iraq which met the threshold of war crimes.

 

 

An ICC spokeswoman declined immediate comment on the submission.
The ICC, which receives dozens of submissions every year and takes very few of them further, can only act where national jurisdictions are unable or unwilling to investigate alleged crimes.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague said Britain's willingness to investigate the allegations meant action by the ICC was unnecessary.
"The British armed forces uphold high standards ... so we reject any allegations of systematic abuse. But where there are substantiated allegations of things going wrong these things have been or are being investigated," Hague told Sky News.
"That does not require references to the International Criminal Court ... This is being dealt with properly within the United Kingdom through a very detailed and exhaustive process."
PUBLIC INQUIRIES
The ECCHR and PIL said more than 400 Iraqi former detainees had made allegations of grave mistreatment, of which 85 had been chosen as "representative cases" in the submission to the ICC.
The two organizations said they wanted the ICC to open formal investigations into senior figures at the Ministry of Defence who "knew or should have known of the widespread patterns of abuse, and turned a blind eye to them", and named former Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon.
Hoon could not be immediately reached for comment.
The ministry said alleged abuses had been or were being investigated through the British and European law courts, through public inquiries, in parliament and through a dedicated publicly funded body called the Iraq Historic Allegations Team.
"Should we be approached by the ICC, we will take the opportunity to explain the very extensive work underway to deal with historic allegations of abuse," the ministry said in a statement.
PIL has played a key role in a number of court cases involving alleged British abuses in Iraq.
It has also been instrumental in bringing about several major public inquiries, including the ongoing Al-Sweady inquiry into allegations that British troops executed and tortured Iraqis in the aftermath of a battle in May 2004. That inquiry is due to present its findings at the end of the year.

Apple Inc does not use patented technology owned by Google Inc unit Motorola Mobility in making its iPhones, an appeals court said on Friday.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a decision by the International Trade Commission in April that Apple did not violate a Google patent to make the popular iPhone.
The smartphone industry has seen dozens of lawsuits on several continents as Apple vies for market share with companies that make smartphones using Google's Android software.
"We're disappointed in this decision and are evaluating our options," Google unit Motorola said in a statement. Apple had no comment on the decision.
Motorola Mobility accused Apple in 2010 of infringing on six of its patents covering technology such as reducing signal noise and programming the device's touch screen so a user's head does not accidentally activate it while talking on the phone. The ITC ruled in April 2013 that Apple did not violate any of the six. The appeals court addressed just one of the six patents.
Google acquired the patents in the case - and the lawsuit - when it purchased Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in 2012, partly for its library of telecommunications patents.
Google's Android software, which the company lets handset makers use for free, has become the world's No. 1 smartphone operating system, ahead of the iOS software used on Apple iPhones.
The ITC, a U.S. trade panel that investigates patent infringement involving imported goods, is a popular venue for patent lawsuits because it can bar the importation of infringing products and because it issues decisions relatively quickly.
The case at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is Motorola Mobility LLC v. International Trade Commission and Apple, Inc.

Kolkata —According to AFP An Indian teenager was gang-raped in two separate attacks and then died after being set on fire, sparking protests in the eastern city of Kolkata and the capital, police said Thursday.
The 16-year-old was first assaulted on October 26 and then again the next day by a group of more than six men near her family's home in the town of Madhyagram, 25 kilometres (15 miles) north of Kolkata.
The second rape occurred as she was returning home after reporting the first attack at a police station.
She was then set on fire on December 23 and died in a state-run hospital late on New Year's Eve, police said.
"She gave us a dying declaration in front of the health officials that she was set on fire by two persons close to the accused when she was alone at home on December 23," local policeman Nimbala Santosh Uttamrao told AFP.
Police made their first arrests on Wednesday, two months after the initial crime, local police chief Rajiv Kumar told AFP.
"The accused tried to kill my daughter by setting her on fire to hush up their crimes," the victim's father, a migrant taxi driver from India's poorest state Bihar, told AFP.
Neither he nor the victim can be named for legal reasons.
Several hundred activists on Wednesday protested in Kolkata over the crime, notable for its shocking brutality even after a year when sex crimes have been widely reported in India.
Activists also gathered in the capital New Delhi on Thursday, accusing the West Bengal government and police of failing to act swiftly after the girl lodged her initial complaint.
"We strongly believe that if your government had acted against the criminals... the subsequent horrific events would have been prevented and the young woman's life could have been saved," the All India Democratic Women's Association, who organised the protest, and other activists wrote in a letter to the state's chief minister.
"The father of the girl ... had brought his family to Kolkata a few months back precisely because they had thought that the daughter would get a better education in Kolkata," the letter said.
A top state official said authorities would move quickly to ensure those responsible for the girl's rape and death were brought to justice, the Press Trust of India reported.
"All the accused against whom there are allegations have been arrested. We are committed to zero tolerance for sexual violence," West Bengal chief secretary Sanjay Mitra told reporters in Kolkata.
Rampant rape, assault and harassment of women in India has been highlighted in the past 12 months after the fatal gang-rape of a 23-year-old student on a moving bus in New Delhi in December 2012 sparked nationwide outrage.
Parliament has since passed tougher laws to punish rapists.
Activists say rape victims often face severe threats and intimidation from their attackers, while police often discourage them from lodging complaints.

  A new feature in Google Inc's Gmail will result in some users receiving messages from people with whom they have not shared their email addresses, raising concerns among some Google products users eg Gmail,blogger blogspot and google social media Google+.
The change, which Google announced on Thursday, broadens the list of contacts available to Gmail users so it includes both the email addresses of their existing contacts, as well as the names of people on the Google+ social network. As a result, a person can send an email directly to friends, and strangers, who use Google+.
Google is increasingly trying to integrate its Google+, a two-and-a-half-year old social network that has 540 million active users, with its other services. When consumers sign up for Gmail, the company's Web-based email service, they are now automatically given a Google+ account.
Google said the new feature will make it easier for people who use both services to communicate with their friends.
"Have you ever started typing an email to someone only to realize halfway through the draft that you haven't actually exchanged email addresses?" the company said in a blog post announcing the feature. "You're in luck, because now it's easier for people using Gmail and Google+ to connect over email."
Google said that users who did not wish to receive email messages from other people on Google+ could switch the settings so that they receive messages only from people they have added to their networks of friends or from no one at all.
Some privacy advocates said Google should have made the new feature "opt-in," meaning that users should explicitly agree to receive messages from other Google+ users, rather than being required to manually change the setting.
Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of non-profit Electronic Privacy Information Center, called the new feature "troubling."
"There is a strong echo of the Google Buzz ," he said, referring to a social networking service that Google launched in 2010. Buzz initially used its Gmail users' contact lists to create social networks that the rest of the world could see, leading to an uproar and ultimately a settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.
Google said the new feature would not expose the email addresses of any Google+ users to strangers. Emails from strangers on Google+ will be routed to a special section within the recipients mailbox that is separate from messages from friends and other contacts. If the recipient does not reply to the message, Gmail will block any future messages from that person.
A Google spokeswoman said the company planned to send an email to all Google+ users during the next two days alerting them to the change and explaining how to change their settings.
One exception to the new feature is celebrities on Google+, who are followed by a large number of fans.