Mrs Leah Rabin, the widow of assassinated Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, died yesterday of lung cancer in a Tel Aviv hospital.
Mrs Rabin (72), who was an outspoken crusader for peace in the Middle East, died only days after the official commemoration ceremony marking the fifth anniversary of her husband's murder. She was too sick to attend the various rallies and services, but watched them on television in hospital.
After her husband's death - at the hands of a religious Jewish extremist opposed to his land-for-peace policies - Mrs Rabin urged Israelis to carry forward her husband's peacemaking legacy.
Mr Shimon Sheves, the former head of the prime minister's bureau under Mr Rabin, recalled yesterday how Mrs Rabin approached a crowd that had gathered outside her apartment only hours after her husband's death, to tell them to continue what he had started.
"Yitzhak has been murdered, not his vision," Mr Sheves recalls her saying.
Mrs Rabin also travelled the world to promote Arab-Israeli coexistence, maintaining contact with world leaders.
During the annual commemoration rally on November 4th, held in the square where her husband was shot, President Clinton telephoned her in hospital. Yesterday he released a statement saying: "We have lost a dear friend and the Middle East has lost a friend of peace."
In 1977, Mr Rabin resigned his first term as prime minister after a journalist revealed Mrs Rabin had kept a dollar account in the US, which was a violation of Israeli law at the time.
Mrs Rabin was not one to mince her words - a trait that at times made her a controversial figure.
She earned the ire of the rightwing religious camp which vigorously opposed her husband's peace policies, after she accused them of fomenting the poisonous climate of incitement which led to his killing.
She also angered some Israelis after she hugged the Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat, at a public ceremony.
After the Camp David summit in July, she criticised Mr Ehud Barak - who has portrayed himself as her husband's natural successor - saying the concessions he had been prepared to make to Mr Arafat were too far-reaching. "Yitzhak is spinning in his grave,"she said, referring to the fact that Mr Barak was prepared to cede large parts of East Jerusalem to the Palestinians.
But, when Mr Barak called a break in the peace process after the start of the Israeli-Palestinian clashes in late September, she again criticised him, this time for abandoning the diplomatic track. And, when Mr Arafat called her after she was hospitalised recently, she reminded him of his historic handshake with her husband on the White House lawns seven years ago.
"I told him," she said in an interview in early November, "that today we have to think of that handshake in order to save our two peoples. I didn't get an answer from him but he heard me and that's also important."
Meanwhile, a Chechen hijacker, armed with a dummy bomb, diverted a Dagestan aircraft to Israel yesterday with 58 passengers on board. The aircraft was refused permission to land at Ben-Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv and was diverted to a military airstrip near the Red Sea resort of Eilat.
The man, who Israeli military officials described as mentally unstable, surrendered, declaring that he feared "the yellow or Asian race" was taking over the "white race".
Israeli officials had originally feared that the hijacking was in support of the Palestinians.