Israel's comatose former prime minister Ariel Sharon has been moved back to his desert ranch, where he will continue to receive treatment.
A secure hospital ward at Sheba Medical Centre outside Tel Aviv had been his home since his January 2006 stroke.
As premier in Sycamore Farm, Mr Sharon would summon advisors to plan strategies such as Israel's 2002 offensive in the West Bank and the surprise 2005 withdrawal from Gaza.
After the 2006 stroke, the ex-general left behind an often jittery Jewish state that has since fought two wars while charting an uncertain course in US-sponsored peace talks with the Palestinians.
'Today, in 2010, the aspiration of any patient, our aspiration in the hospital, is to ensure that any chronic patient, when possible, is with his community, at home,' said Prof Shlomo Noy, director of the Sheba rehabilitation centre.
Asked whether there was any chance of the 82-year-old making a significant recovery, Prof Noy told Israel's Army Radio: 'Clearly what's behind this is the hope that his situation will get better.
'But the improvements that we talk about in such situations are not great improvements, not dramatic improvements.'
After his stroke, Mr Sharon settled into what medical staff and the friends who were allowed to visit describe as a limbo state.
He is uncommunicative but apparently responding to basic stimuli and television.
Ehud Olmert, Mr Sharon's deputy and successor, recalled in a memoir telling the then US president, George W Bush, that Mr Sharon's two sons refused to consider stopping his life support as they believed his condition was not irretrievable.
Mr Sharon spearheaded Israel's repulsion of Egyptian forces in the 1973 war.
As defence minister in 1982, he masterminded the Lebanon invasion but was forced to step down over the massacre there of Palestinian refugees by allied Christian militiamen.
While many Arabs reviled his war record and zeal to build on occupied land, Mr Sharon won respect as prime minister for ploughing through Israel's fractious coalition politics to form the new, centrist Kadima party and pull out of Gaza.
Whether Mr Sharon, who at one point cornered Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Beirut with tanks, would have secured a peace accord remains debated, not least as Hamas Islamists opposed to coexistence with Israel were quick to fill the Gaza vacuum.
The corruption and infighting-riddled Likud party that Mr Sharon left has rebounded, its rightist leader Benjamin Netanyahu serving as premier today astride a mostly stable coalition.
Installing Mr Sharon in Sycamore Farm, in the southern Negev desert, was likely to take around 48 hours, Prof Noy said, adding that he may need to be brought back to the hospital from time to time for check-ups.
