Former Israeli president Shimon Peres dies at 93

Shimon Peres, the ninth president of Israel and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in negotiating the Oslo Accords, has died. He was 93.

Peres suffered a stroke two weeks ago, and was on a respirator at a hospital near Tel Aviv when his health quickly declined and he died, the official Israel News Agency reports. During his long career in politics, Peres — who in 1934 emigrated at age 11 from Poland to British Mandate Palestine — held almost every significant position in the Israeli government. He was first elected to parliament in 1959, and had two brief turns as prime minister.

Peres served a seven-year term as president from 2007 to 2014, and argued for a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He was a key player in putting together the Oslo Accords, and was jointly awarded the Nobel prize in 1994 with Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister at the time, and Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Peres, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2012 and founded the Peres Center for Peace, is survived by his wife, Sonya, and three children.

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