Israel on Monday hailed the late US congressman Tom Lantos, a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor who played a key role in rallying US support for the Jewish state.

Israel "expresses great sorrow" over the loss of the 80-year-old Lantos, who died earlier the same day from cancer of the esophagus, the foreign ministry said.

Lantos "was a leader in promoting Israeli-US ties in Congress. His commitment to human rights and the commemoration of the Holocaust were the pillars of his public work," it said.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that "Israel owes a great debt to Lantos for dedicating himself to promoting Israeli-US ties and his activities for the Jewish people."

Born in Budapest to a Jewish family in February 1928, Lantos was 16 when Nazi Germany occupied Hungary. As a teenager, he was a member of the anti-Nazi resistance and later of the anti-Communist student movement.

After the Soviets invaded Hungary, he discovered that most of his family had died in the Holocaust. By 1947, he was in the United States on an academic scholarship and became an economics professor in San Francisco.

He was elected to Congress in 1980 where he served as the chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Since the Democrats regained control of Congress in 2006 elections, Lantos used his committee to launch strident appeals for greater US action on human rights in China, Darfur, Myanmar and Russia.

Under his stewardship, the committee voted in October to describe the mass slaughter of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire as "genocide" -- plunging US relations with Turkey into crisis.