Shimon
Peres, one of Israel’s defining political figures and a Nobel peace
prize laureate, has died at the age of 93, two weeks
after suffering a stroke.
Peres had
twice served as prime minister of Israel and later as the country’s ninth
president. He had been seriously ill on a respirator in an Israeli hospital
near Tel Aviv and died after his condition deteriorated sharply.
Among
those who have said they will attend his funeral and burial on Jerusalem’s
Mount Herzl on Friday are Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, as
well as Prince Charles and François Hollande.
In more
than six decades of political life his defining achievement was as one
of the key architects of the Oslo peace accords, for which he was
jointly awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1994 with the then Israeli prime
minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine
Liberation Organisation.
Those
peace agreements – signed in Washington in 1993 and Taba, Egypt in 1995, –
foresaw the creation of a Palestinian state, and were named after the Norwegian
capital where the two sides launched eight months of secret negotiations in
which Peres played a key role.
With
Peres’s death the last of that trio has now gone.
Rabin was
cut down by a rightwing assassin’s bullet in 1995, with Arafat dying nine years
later. Today, the prospect of the peace and two-state solution offered by Oslo
is far away, after the collapse of that peace process in 2014.
Peres’s
death was formally confirmed on Wednesday morning by his son Chemi in a news
conference at the hospital where his father had been treated. He had been
rushed to hospital on 13 September after suffering a stroke.
“Today with deep sorrow we bid
farewell to our beloved father, the ninth president of Israel,” said Peres’s
son. “Our father’s legacy has always been to look to tomorrow. We were
privileged to be part of his private family, but today we sense that the entire
nation of Israel and the global community share this great loss. We share this
pain together.”
Within
hours of his death, tributes to Peres began from world leaders. In a statement,
Obama described him as “the essence of Israel itself”.
He added:
“As Americans, we are in his debt because, having worked with every US
president since John F Kennedy, no one did more over so many years as Shimon
Peres to build the
alliance between our two countries – an unbreakable alliance that today is
closer and stronger than it has ever been.”
The UN
secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said: “He worked tirelessly for a two-state
solution that would enable Israel to live securely and harmoniously with the
Palestinians and the wider region.
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