Nobel laureate and former Israeli Prime Minister, Shimon Perez succumbed to illness at a hospital in Tel Aviv today. He was 93 and was being treated after a suffering a stroke two weeks ago. Acclaimed as the founder of modern Israel, Perez is credited with his the Oslo Accords, which created the Palestinian Authority and formed the basis of negotiations to fulfill the “right to self determination”
of the Palestinian people. He was honored with the Nobel Peace prize along with then Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 1994. Leaders, the likes of US President Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Prince Charles, François Hollande will be attending his funeral on Friday. “Today with deep sorrow we bid farewell to our beloved father, the ninth president of Israel,” said Peres’s son Chemi. “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.”
The 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 Perezs’ death, the last of the trio is now gone.
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