BICOM

Israel’s ninth President and elder statesman Shimon Peres passed away overnight, having suffered a major stroke two weeks ago.

93-year-old Peres had been in a medically-induced coma at the Sheba Medical Centre near Tel Aviv since suffering the stroke. His condition had appeared to stabilise, but deteriorated dramatically yesterday. Medical staff called his family to his bedside yesterday to say their final goodbyes before Peres passed away around 3am.

In a statement to the media early this morning, Peres’s son Chemi said: “Today with deep sorrow we bid farewell to our beloved father, the ninth President of Israel.”

He added: “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.”

Born Szymon Perski in 1923 in Vishnyeva, Belarus, then part of Poland, Peres came to Israel with his family aged 11. During his youth, he was deeply involved in the Labour Zionist movement and became the political protégé of Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Aged just 29, Peres was appointed director general of Israel’s Defence Ministry and played a major role in developing the country’s defence industry and what is thought to be Israel’s nuclear reactor at Dimona.

Peres is considered to be one of Israel’s most distinguished statesmen. In addition to serving as President from 2007 until 2014, he was Prime Minister on two occasions and a member of 12 cabinets. As a parliamentarian, Peres enjoyed an unbroken spell in the Knesset from 1959 to 2006 (he resigned from the Knesset for three months in 2006). He was also awarded the Nobel Peace Prize having played a major role as foreign minister alongside then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in forging the Oslo Peace Accords with the Palestinians in the early 1990s.

Following his retirement from the presidency, Peres maintained a busy public schedule and his voice on public issues was still considered to carry significant weight.