Gaza blockade is 'human rights crime': Carter

0 Comments | AFP, May, 2008

LONDON (AFP) — Former US president Jimmy Carter on Sunday described Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip as "one of the greatest human rights crimes now existing on Earth."

In a speech at a literary festival in Hay-on-Wye, in Wales, the 83-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner said: "There is no reason to treat these people this way," referring to the blockade, in place since the Islamist Hamas movement seized Gaza in June 2007.

While president from 1977 to 1981, Carter was the architect of the landmark 1979 peace deal between Israel and Egypt, the first such treaty between the Jewish state and an Arab country.

According to Carter, the failure of the European Union to support the Palestinian cause was "embarrassing."

He said European countries should be...