Associated Press
JERUSALEM — Leah Rabin, who became an outspoken campaigner for peace after her husband, the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, was struck down by an assassin’s bullet, died Sunday of cancer. She was 72.
She counted political leaders, including President Clinton and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, among her close friends, and after her husband was killed she crisscrossed the globe to carry the torch for his peace policies.
"We have lost a dear friend, and the Middle East has lost a friend of peace," Clinton said.
Former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, a Labor party ally of Mrs. Rabin’s husband, said she was "like a lioness."
"When she learned of her illness she did not surrender," Peres said, "and went out to the great battle for her life, as she had fought, with the same courage, to eternalize the memory of her husband."
Mrs. Rabin had been suffering from cancer at least since the spring. The gravity of her illness became clear when she was unable to appear at a rally Nov. 4 marking the fifth anniversary of her husband’s killing.
She is to be buried Wednesday in a plot next to her late husband’s in Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl cemetery. First her coffin will lie in state at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, where Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995, Israel television’s second channel reported.
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