Israeli ex-president Shimon Peres dies

Jerusalem / AFP

Israeli ex-president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres died on Wednesday, some two weeks after suffering a major stroke.
Peres, who was 93, held nearly every major office in the country, serving twice as prime minister and also as president, a mostly ceremonial role, from 2007 to 2014. He won the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize jointly with prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for his role in negotiating the Oslo accords, which envisioned an independent Palestinian state.
Peres died around 3:00 am (0000 GMT), Rafi Walden, who was Peres’s personal doctor and also his son-in-law, said.
His family held a press conference later in the morning, praising Peres’s tireless work ethic and what they called his devotion to peace.
US President Barack Obama immediately hailed Peres as a friend who “never gave up on the possibility of peace.”
“There are few people who we share this world with who change the course of human history, not just through their role in human events, but because they expand our moral imagination and force us to expect more of ourselves,” Obama said in a statement.
“My friend Shimon was one of those people.”
Obama was among world leaders such as Britain’s Prince Charles and French President Francois Hollande planning to attend Peres’s funeral at Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl on Friday.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his “profound sadness”. Opposition leader Isaac Herzog, the head of Labour, Peres’s longtime party, said he will be “forever remembered as an icon of Israel’s history.”
Born in Poland in 1923, Peres emigrated to what was then British-mandated Palestine when he was 11.
He joined the Zionist struggle and met David Ben-Gurion, who would become his mentor and Israel’s first prime minister. Peres became director general of the nascent defence ministry at just 29.
Beyond his accomplishments in the public eye, he was also seen as a driving force in the development of Israel’s undeclared nuclear programme in the 1950s.
Hamas calls Peres a criminal
Hamas welcomed the death of former Israeli president Shimon Peres on Wednesday, calling him a “criminal”, while Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas lauded the “brave” Nobel Peace Prize winner.
In the Gaza Strip, a spokesman for the Islamist Hamas movement which runs the enclave said: “The Palestinian people are happy at the death of this criminal.
“Shimon Peres was one of the last Israeli founders of occupation. His death marks the end of an era in the history of the Israeli occupation,” spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said.
But Abbas had a sharply different reaction in the West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority dominated by his Fatah party is in power.
“Abbas sent a message of condolence to the family of former president Shimon Peres, expressing his sadness and sorrow,” WAFA reported.
While Peres has been praised abroad and in Israel as a peacemaker, many Palestinians view him very differently, citing his involvement in successive Arab-Israeli wars and the occupation of Palestinian territory.
He was also prime minister in 1996 when more than 100 civilians were killed while sheltering at a UN peacekeepers’ base in the Lebanese village of Qana fired upon by Israel.