​​​​​​​Jimmy Carter: The US president who shaped the modern Middle East dies aged 100

Jimmy Carter, the 39th US president and driving force behind the Camp David Accords, which eventually led to the Israel-Egypt peace treaty in 1979, died on 29 December 2024 at the age of 100, surrounded by his family at his home in Plains, Georgia, said the Carter Centre.

Although only in power for one term, from 1977 until 1980, Carter’s policies and actions during several pivotal events in the Middle East have had a lasting impact on the region and represented some of his biggest triumphs and challenges.

“Jimmy Carter deserves much more credit for his presidency than he has been given and particularly his role in the Middle East,” said Bruce Riedel, former CIA analyst and a nonresident senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

“In many ways, you could say the modern Middle East was shaped by Jimmy Carter.”

Carter, one of only four US presidents to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, was born in 1924 in Plains, Georgia, a small farming town where his father, Earl, worked as a businessman and his mother, Lillian, as a nurse at the hospital where he was born. 

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