NEW YORK: Former US president Jimmy Carter said on Wednesday that a recent liver surgery revealed he had cancer and it had spread to other parts of his body.

The 90-year-old Carter underwent surgery to remove a small mass in his liver earlier this month. He said he would reveal more “when facts are known, possibly next week”. The White House said Mr Obama spoke to Mr Carter on phone on Wednesday and wished him a speedy recovery.

After leaving the White House in 1981, Jimmy Carter devoted himself to humanitarian work, founding the Carter Centre to promote his vision of service to humanity.

He won the Nobel Peace prize in 2002 for his commitment to finding solutions to international conflicts, his work with human rights organisations and programmes for betterment of the poor.

In “Peace, not Apartheid”, a book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict published in 2006 , the former US president accused Israel of creating an apartheid system in the West Bank and Gaza.

“Palestinians are deprived of basic human rights, their land has been occupied, then confiscated, then colonised by Israeli settlers,” he wrote.

Mr Carter has done what few American politicians have dared to do: speak frankly about the Israel-Palestine conflict.

He did his best to prick the world’s conscience by pointing to “the abominable oppression and persecution in occupied Palestinian territories, with a rigid system of required passes and strict segregation between Palestine’s citizens and Jewish settlers in the West Bank”, a spokesman for the Palestinian Authority said in praise of the book.

Published in Dawn, August 14th, 2015

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