Shootout near Israeli embassy underlines risks to Jordan from Gaza war

Violence in Amman rattles nerves as authorities seek to calm public anger over Israel's conduct in the conflict

Police vehicles on a street near the Israeli embassy in Amman on Sunday. Reuters

Deadly weekend violence near the Israeli embassy in Amman has rattled nerves in the kingdom as authorities try to keep a lid on public anger over the war in Gaza while adhering to long-standing obligations regarding Israel.

Residents of the relatively well-to-do Rabieh neighbourhood, where the Israeli diplomatic mission is located, woke up on Sunday to the sound of gunfire. An assailant with an AK-47 had penetrated a cordon and started firing at security patrols. He was killed and three security personnel were wounded after a chase lasting at least two hours.

Authorities said the gunman was carrying an automatic weapon and Molotov cocktails. Although official statements classified the attack as terrorism, no mentions were made of a motive.

"The Israeli embassy has been empty for a while and the man would not have not harmed anyone really had he managed to set fire to the embassy. But the symbolism is important," said a diplomat in Amman whose brief is Jordanian domestic politics.

Such attacks are rare in Jordan, which has a defence pact with Washington and a peace treaty with Israel that obliges each side to prevent threats to each other's security. Since the Gaza war started last year with an attack on Israel by the Iran-backed militant group Hamas, Jordan has fiercely criticised Israeli killings of civilians in the Palestinian enclave. In the latest condemnation, Foreign Minister Ayman Al Safadi told a conference in Rome on Monday that Gaza has become a "a grave for children and for human values".

Nonetheless, authorities have sought to contain anger against Israel by banning public assemblies near the border and dismissing calls by Hamas for Jordanians to attack Israel.

This approach has helped to maintain Jordan’s stability, in addition to being a reliable counter-terrorism partner of the US, while also accommodating the country’s opposition, which made gains in the latest parliamentary elections in September.

State media published a repudiation of the weekend attack in Rabieh and suggested the assailant may have been from the southern Maaytah tribe, but there was no official confirmation of his identity. The tribe is one of the so-called "East Bank" tribes that existed in the kingdom before waves of Palestinian refugees arrived in 1948 and 1967.

They underpin the country's security apparatus and form the bedrock of support for the monarchy. However, support for the Palestinians spreads far beyond these tribes in Jordan, particularly since the Gaza war.

The violence in Rabieh came a month after a failed cross-border infiltration attempt into Israel from Jordan that the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood said was carried out by two of its members. The group's glorification of the incident drew an angry official response. Authorities "will not allow any party to bring instability and destruction" to Jordan, said Prime Minister Jafar Hassan.

An official who requested anonymity cautioned against putting the weekend clash at the embassy in the same league politically as the infiltration attempt into Israel, which he said was aimed at undermining Jordan's policy of support for the Palestinians through peaceful means and diplomatic efforts. "This was a disturbed man with a criminal record whose target was to harm the police,” the official said.

But another diplomat who regularly meets senior officials in Amman said the attack has made "an already tense situation" worse. "Except for Al Qaeda types, we have not really seen people in Jordan shooting at police patrols," he said. "This is bound to worry the establishment."