FACTBOX: Who is Jimmy Carter?

April 18 (Reuters) - Former President Jimmy Carter planned to meet Hamas's leader-in-exile Khaled Meshaal in Syria on Friday.

Here are a few facts about Jimmy Carter:

-- Carter, born on Oct.1, 1924, was president from 1977-1981.

* MIDDLE EAST RELATIONS:

-- Carter brought Egypt's President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to Camp David for gruelling negotiations in 1978.

-- When the accords seemed to be unravelling, Carter saved the day by flying to Cairo and Jerusalem for personal shuttle diplomacy.

-- The treaties ended a state of war between Israel and Egypt, provided for Israeli withdrawal from Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and established the first diplomatic relations between Israel and a powerful Arab country. The treaties were signed at the White House on March 26, 1979.

-- Recently Carter angered the Israeli government with his plan to meet Hamas's top leader Khaled Meshaal and by describing Israeli policy in the occupied Palestinian territories as "a system of apartheid" in a 2006 book.

-- Carter has stressed he was not acting during his current regional visit as negotiator or mediator but that he hoped, "just as a communicator", to relay to leaders of the United States what Hamas and Syria have to say.

* LIFE AFTER THE PRESIDENCY:

-- He was handed a humiliating defeat by Ronald Reagan at the end of his first term and left office with the economy crumbling and the Iran hostage crisis inflaming passions.

-- He returned home to Plains, Georgia, and led a life of relative obscurity, but has re-emerged and was brought in by President Bill Clinton in 1994 to lead a U.S. delegation to Haiti to persuade a military junta to step aside and avert a U.S. invasion of the country.

-- Carter won the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for his decades of work for peace, human rights and democracy from the Middle East to North Korea. In May 2002, he became the only U.S. president, current or former, to visit Cuba since Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution launched implacable hostilities between the United States and one of its closest neighbours.

(For main story click on [nL18724139]) (Writing by David Cutler, London Editorial Reference Unit; editing by Samia Nakhoul)

((Reuters Messaging david.cutler.reuters.com@reuters.net, +44 20 7542 7968, fax +44 20 7542 8648))