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 having 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.
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 with the then Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
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.
“Today with deep sorrow we bid farewell to our beloved father, the ninth president of Israel,” he said. “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.”
Reports in the Israeli media said that the former president’s coffin will lie in state in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, on Thursday ahead of his funeral on Friday.
Within hours of his death, tributes to Peres began from world leaders. In a statement, President Barack 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.”
Former president George HW Bush also praised “his unyielding determination and principle”. “Shimon Peres time and again helped guide his beloved country through the crucible of mortal challenge.”
Former president Bill Clinton and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said they had “lost a true and treasured friend” following news of the death. The Clintons said Israel had lost a leader “who championed its security, prosperity and limitless possibilities from its birth to his last day on Earth”.
They called him “a genius with a big heart who used his gifts to imagine a future of reconciliation, not conflict”.
Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, said: “Shimon Peres was, above all, a man of peace and a man dedicated to the wellbeing of the Jewish people” who he said was “was devoted to promoting understanding between his country and its neighbours, and shared a Nobel peace prize for his efforts to create peace in the Middle East”.
Peres was rushed to hospital on 13 September after he reported feeling ill. After several tests he was diagnosed as having had a stroke.
The last surviving figure associated with the founding of modern Israel, Peres’s life story tracked many of the most important moments in the country’s short history, which saw him move from being a hawk to a peacemaker – a legacy that substantially unravelled in recent years, to his dismay.
Long a deeply divisive figure in Israeli politics, in later life Peres became one of the country’s most popular public figures, serving a seven-year term as president from 2007-14.
[UK Guardian]
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