World leaders in Jerusalem for final farewell to Shimon Peres

The funeral of former Israeli president, prime minister and Nobel laureate Shimon Peres has begun in Jerusalem amid an “unprecedented” security operation with over 70 world leaders and dignitaries in attendance.

Among those participating in the funeral at Mount Herzl cemetery were Barack Obama, former US president Bill Clinton, Prince Charles and British foreign secretary Boris Johnson, and the French leader Francois Hollande along with other heads of state and fifteen foreign ministers.

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, who has not visited Jerusalem since 2010, was also due to attend despite facing opposition from members of his own Fatah movement over whether he should go.

The former Israeli president’s coffin was carried out of the Knesset at 8.30am by eight military pall bearers, followed by his family, with the procession led by another member of Israel’s armed forces reciting the kaddish – the Jewish prayer for the dead.

The coffin was loaded into a hearse to travel to Mount Herzl cemetery shortly after US president Obama’s jet set down at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport. Obama was accompanied on Airforce one by vice-president Joe Biden, secretary of state John Kerry and eighteen members of Congress.

As part of the operation, 8,000 police have been deployed while the main road between Ben Gurion and Jerusalem will be closed for large parts of the day as well as other roads in the city itself with police placed every 30m along the main route.

Israeli police chief Roni Alsheich said that as part of the “unprecedented” operation to secure the funeral several Jewish and Arab suspects had been preemptively arrested over fears that they might try to disrupt the proceedings.

The coffin of Peres, who died on Wednesday at the age of 93 after suffering a stroke two weeks before, was driven in a cortege from the Knesset – where he has been lying in state ahead of the funeral – to the cemetery.

An estimated 30,000 people had filed past his coffin as he lay in state outside parliament in Jerusalem on Thursday.

Among those listed to deliver eulogies during the ceremony – in an open area next to the tomb of Theodor Herzl, one of the key founders of the Zionist movement – are Peres’s children, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Clinton and Obama.

Peres will be buried next to Yitzak Rabin, the former Israeli prime minister who was assassinated in 1995 by a Jewish extremist opposed to the Oslo peace accords and with whom Peres was jointly awarded the Nobel peace prize along with then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Peres’s death on Wednesday at the age of 93 led to an outpouring of tributes worldwide for Israel’s last remaining founding father.

Bill Clinton, who had helped usher in the Oslo accords, was among those who paid their last respects to Peres in front of his coffin and has called him

In a career spanning seven decades, Peres held nearly every major office, serving twice as prime minister and as president, a mainly ceremonial role, from 2007 to 2014. He was also an architect of Israel’s undeclared nuclear programme and defence industries.

While those in the West and within Israel have hailed Peres as a peacemaker, many Palestinians and those from Arab nations have questioned his record, citing his involvement in successive Arab-Israeli wars, the occupation of Palestinian territory and his support for settlement building before his work on Oslo.

He was also prime minister in 1996 when more than 100 civilians were killed while sheltering at a UN peacekeepers’ base in the Lebanese village of Qana when it was fired upon by Israel.

Despite his reputation as a statesman, Peres never managed to outright win a national election. Many in Israel opposed to the Oslo accords also blamed him for what they saw as their failure.

But in later life, especially during his time as president, he came to be widely embraced.