Shimon Peres, Israel's 'warrior for peace', dies aged 93

Shimon Peres, the former Israeli president who shared a Nobel prize for forging a peace deal between his country and Palestine, has died in Tel Aviv, aged 93.

He was admitted to hospital two weeks ago after having a stroke. "His condition [had] improved before a sudden deterioration on Tuesday," says the BBC.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his "deep personal grief on the passing of the beloved of the nation".

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Peres will be remembered as a "statesman who helped build his country into a nuclear-armed regional military power", says the Washington Post.

However, the famously hawkish leader turned to peace in his later years and his "defining achievement" was his role in negotiating the Oslo peace accords, The Guardian says, for which he was jointly awarded the 1994 Nobel peace prize, along with Yitzhak Rabin, then Israeli prime minister, and Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

"The longest serving of all of Israel's public servants, Peres was a person about whom it could rightly be said: The history of the State of Israel is the history of Shimon Peres," says the Jerusalem Post.

Tributes have poured in from around the globe.

"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," said US President Barack Obama. "My friend Shimon was one of those people."

Often described as a "warrior for peace", Peres served as prime minister of Israel on three separate occasions: as acting PM in 1977, then from 1984 to 1986 in the national unity government and for seven months in 1995 and 1996, after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.

He later served a seven-year term as Israel's ninth president, from 2007 to 2014. He stepped down from the role two weeks before his 91st birthday.