Shahid, the former Palestinian ambassador in the European Union, commented in an interview on France Info on Wednesday.
Diana Buttu, a former Palestinian peace negotiator commented that many will remember Peres as a “war criminal”.
“He's somebody who believed in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine,” added Buttu.
Al Jazeera's Middle East analyst Yehia Ghanem said in an interview that “people who are praising him [Peres] supported Israel and all of its crimes throughout its history.” Referring to the 1996 Qana Massacre, which killed at least 106 people in a village in Southern Lebanon, he described the bloodshed as a war crime followed by Peres’ command as the Prime Minister.
After the announcement of his death by his son, world leaders pay tribute on Wednesday.
Calling him “a soldier for Israel” and “a friend”,US president Barack Obama expressed his sorrow in a White House statement that he felt the Americans are “in his debt”. He praised Peres’ diplomatic efforts on bringing together Israel and the US: “no one did more over so many years as Shimon Peres to build the alliance between our two countries”.
He was hailed as the “political giant” by Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and “an optimist about the prospects for reconciliation and peace” by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
Peres won the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, jointly with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the former Palestinian president Yasser Arafat, for their role in negotiating the Oslo Accords. It was aimed to the achievement of an independent Palestinian state.
He spent the first half of his political life