Word leaders among them US President Barack Obama have gathered in Israel for the funeral of Shimon Peres, the former Israeli prime minister and president.
The Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is also scheduled to attend the burial, which will be held in the “Great Leaders of the Nation” section of Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl cemetery.
Peres died on Wednesday aged 93, jointly he won a Nobel Prize for his peace efforts with the Palestinians in the 1990s.
Obama and Netanyahu are set to deliver eulogies at the cemetery, which overlooks the Jerusalem forest and a verdant valley, in what could be an opportunity for the president to encourage Israelis and Palestinians to revive peacemaking.
Peres will be buried in a Jewish religious ceremony, in a plot between two former prime ministers, Yitzhak Rabin and Yitzhak Shamir.
Rabin was assassinated by an ultranationalist Israeli in 1995 over the interim peace deals that he and Peres reached with the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
Outside Israel’s parliament on Thursday, an estimated 50,000 Israelis filed past Peres’s flag-draped coffin as it lay in state.
The former Prime Minister was mourned by various leaders as a man of courage who never feared to fight fr what was right.
“I will remember him as a man of courage: never afraid to fight for what was right; always ready to make peace when the time was right.
Israel has lost a statesman. On behalf of the people of Kenya, I pray that God will grant his family and his nation the strength to bear the loss,” wrote Kenya President Uhuru Kenyatta.