Israelis, Palestinians pay respects to late peace activist

JERUSALEM – Senior Israeli opposition leaders and Palestinian officials are paying their respects to late Israeli journalist and peace activist Uri Avnery, who died this week at age 94.

Dozens of people, including a delegation of Palestinian officials, attended a memorial for Avnery on Wednesday in Tel Aviv.

Nabil Shaath, an adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, says he came to “remember a great man of peace,” and that the “commitment to peace is still alive because there are people in Israel like Uri Avnery.”

Avnery, a member of Israel’s founding generation, was a symbol of Israel’s peace camp for decades and championed the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As a journalist, he famously sneaked into besieged Beirut during the 1982 Lebanon War to talk to Israel’s then-nemesis, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat.