Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has quit the right-wing Likud party he helped to found and said he was forming a new party after asking Israel's president to declare an early election.
"I am resigning from the party and forming a new one," Mr Sharon wrote in a letter to Likud's chairman, Israeli radio said.
Ariel Sharon
Mr Sharon submitted his resignation from the Likud shortly after asking President Moshe Katsav to dissolve parliament and order an early election.
Mr Katsav said Mr Sharon told him the government could not function in the current political climate.
This evening Israeli lawmakers approved a preliminary motion for dissolving parliament in a first step towards holding an early general election.
The bill passed by a vote of 84-0 with 10 abstentions, Knesset officials said.
Mr Sharon's resignation triggered a political earthquake that analysts said would reverberate through Israeli politics for years to come. Mr Sharon has already recruited 14 Likud parliamentarians, including five cabinet ministers, to his new party.
He is also courting leading figures from the centre-left Labour Party, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres.
The 77-year-old former army general helped establish the Likud in the early 1970s and was responsible for breathing new life into the party when he took over the helm in 1999 after then-leader Benjamin Netanyahu lost a general election.
Mr Netanyahu is the leading contender to head the disintegrating party which rebelled against Mr Sharon over his policy of unilaterally withdrawing from the Gaza Strip.
This month's surprise election of Mr Amir Peretz as head of Labour accelerated the spiral toward early elections.
Labour joined Mr Sharon's coalition government in January to buttress support for the Gaza pullout, but in one of his first moves, Mr Peretz extracted letters of resignation from the eight Labour Cabinet ministers last week.
In a strident campaign speech, his first as party leader, Mr Peretz told the convention that Mr Sharon had partially corrected his mistake of building settlements in Gaza by pulling out, but he charged that in constructing them in the first place, Mr Sharon had wasted "billions that could have been used to turn the education system around".
Blaming Mr Sharon and his ex-finance minister Mr Netanyahu for increasing poverty and "humiliating" the poor, Mr Peretz appealed to Israel's lower classes, traditionally Likud voters.
"Come join the new social pact . . . you are not abandoning Likud. Likud has abandoned you," he said, emphasising social issues over Israel's traditional election deciders - security and the Palestinian issue.
"We do not intend to win the elections by catching the Likud with its pants down. We want to win because we have a better platform and we bring something else to the equation," Mr Peretz told reporters.