TEL AVIV, Nov 17: Abba Eban, a former Israeli foreign minister and one of its best known diplomats, died on Sunday at the age of 87 in a hospital near Tel Aviv, an Israeli Foreign Ministry source said.

A spokeswoman for the Rabin Medical Centre in the Israeli town of Petah Tikva confirmed Eban’s death, but would not give further details.

Eban was born Aubrey Solomon Meir in Cape Town, South Africa, on Feb 2, 1915.

Eban spent a decade as Israel’s first ambassador to the United Nations and the United States and was foreign minister for eight years, pleading the Jewish state’s cause in the international arena for more than 40 years.

A lone dove for most of his 30-year political career in Israel’s Labour Party, Eban championed an image of an idealistic democratic Jewish state rising from the ashes of the Holocaust.

Eban came out in favour of the establishment of a Palestinian state and berated right-wing Israeli politicians for believing they could hold onto the West Bank and Gaza Strip — lands occupied in the 1967 war.

But one of his best known jibes came after the Palestine Liberation Organisation rejected the 1978 Camp David accords that led to an Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.

Eban said at the time that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat “never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity” — a phrase which has since become a mantra for Israeli diplomats.—Reuters