Shimon Peres, one of Israels defining political figures and a Nobel peace prize laureate, has died at the age of 93, two weeks after having a stroke, the official Israel News Agency has confirmed.
Peres had twice served as prime minister of Israel and later as the countrys 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.
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