“With him dies a humanist voice which carried the hope of peace and gave all its strength to make it happen,” reacted the Élysée in a press release this Monday.
The Franco-Israeli Ofer Bronchtein, tireless campaigner for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, died Monday in Paris, announced the International Forum for Peace. “With him dies a humanist voice which carried the hope of peace and gave all its strength to make it happen”read the Élysée in a statement.
Co-founder with his Palestinian friend Anis al Qaq and president of the International Forum for Peace, based in Paris, Ofer Bronchtein “was for decades this determined smuggler between two peoples”. In 2011, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas gave him a Palestinian passport, “Thus honoring a promise from (his predecessor) Yasser Arafat”recalls the Élysée.
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Born March 27, 1957 in Beersheba, in the south of Israel, he lived between Israel and France. The Forum for Peace emphasizes that the activist had notably “defied in the 1980s a ban from the Israeli government which refused any contact with representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)”.
The funeral will take place on Wednesday at Père-Lachaise
He then participated, in the 1990s, in the Oslo peace process, working with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin before he was assassinated by an ultranationalist religious Jew, continues the Forum.
“Since then, Ofer Bronchtein had made the recognition of a Palestinian state the fight of his life, succeeding in convincing President Emmanuel Macron to take this step in 2025 at the UN”in the name of France, he underlines. The head of state had entrusted him, a few years earlier, with “a mission to open avenues of rapprochement between Israeli and Palestinian civil societies”he also recalls.
“While the terrorist attack of October 7 (2023) committed by the (Palestinian Islamist group) Hamas threw the region into chaos, he was one of those who wanted to see the recognition of the State of Palestine by France, affirmed by the president on September 22, 2025 at the United Nations.”explains the Élysée. Ofer Bronchtein’s funeral will take place on Wednesday at the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
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