Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin assassinated at peace rally – archive, 6 November 1995

6 November 1995: prime minister shot at close range by 25-year-old Yigal Amir who told police ‘I acted alone on God’s orders and I have no regrets’

Israel, forced to confront its divisions by a Jewish assassin’s bullets, today buries the prime minister who promised peace, and looks ahead to a future suddenly filled with new fears of conflict.

Related: Yitzhak Rabin: ‘He never knew it was one of his people who shot him in the back’

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Yitzhak Rabin: ‘He never knew it was one of his people who shot him in the back’

Twenty-five years after the death of the Israeli prime minister, those who were there recall the night two bullets altered the destiny of two nations

They wanted him to wear a bulletproof vest, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Afterwards, they wished they’d pushed him harder – they should have insisted – but he was the prime minister and his mind was made up. He refused to believe a fellow citizen might pose a mortal threat.

And so a quarter of a century ago, on the night of 4 November 1995, Yitzhak Rabin stood before a vast and grateful crowd in Tel Aviv at a peace rally, protected by nothing more than a jacket, tie and white cotton shirt. The size of the rally had surprised him: he was a shy man, awkward with attention, and he had doubted that thousands of Israelis would come out to show support for him and his attempt to make peace with the Palestinians. He told aides he feared the city’s central plaza – not yet called Rabin Square – would be empty.

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President Obama and former Shimon Peres’s son during funeral…

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