Jehan Sadat, widow of former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel, died in Egypt on Friday. She was 87.
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In recent weeks, Egyptian media press reported that she had been hospitalized and was battling cancer. No further details about her illness were made available.
President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi's office said she had been a role model for Egyptian women and granted her a national award posthumously. A key highway in Cairo is to be named after her. She was buried in a military funeral ceremony on Friday, attended by el-Sissi and dozens of other government officials.
Jehan Safwat Raouf was born in August 1933 in Cairo to an Egyptian middle-class father and a British mother. In 1949, at age 15, she married Anwar Sadat, a military officer at the time who later served as Egypt's president from 1970 until his assassination by Islamic extremists in 1981.
Jehan Sadat consistently defended her husband's decision to sign a peace agreement with Israel in 1979 after nearly three decades of war, a move that was controversial domestically and regionally.
After his assassination, she largely withdrew from public life. But in recent years, she emerged as a supporter of former military general el-Sissi and his government, after the country's 2011 popular uprising forced her husband's successor, Hosni Mubarak, to resign.
