Egyptian and Israeli leaders send condolences for Carter, who brokered their peace treaty

TEL AVIV, Israel — The leaders of Israel and Egypt sent their condolences to former president Jimmy Carter’s family.

“His significant role in achieving the peace agreement between Egypt and Israel will remain etched in the annals of history,” Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi said in a statement. “His enduring legacy ensures that he will be remembered as one of the world’s most prominent leaders in service to humanity.”

Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, wrote on social media site X that Carter’s legacy “will be defined by his deep commitment to forging peace between nations.”

“In recent years I had the pleasure of calling him and thanking him for his historic efforts to bring together two great leaders, Begin and Sadat, and forging a peace between Israel and Egypt that remains an anchor of stability throughout the Middle East and North Africa many decades later,” Herzog wrote, referring to former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

One of the crowning foreign policy achievements of Carter’s single term as U.S. president was brokering a series of agreements that later came to be called the Camp David accords in 1978. Named after the presidential retreat in Maryland, the agreements laid the basis for a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel the year after.

That treaty made Egypt the first Arab country to formally recognize the state of Israel, a move condemned by other Arab nations but which led to demilitarization of the Sinai Peninsula that lies between Israel and Egypt.

In a 2003 interview, Carter told NPR, “the treaty that we worked out with Israel and Egypt… not a single word of it has been violated on either side.”