Jordan after 7 October

The attack carried out in Israeli territory on 7 October 2023 by Hamas and other armed groups from the Gaza Strip, combined with Israel’s multi-layered response against the Palestinian populations in Gaza and the West Bank, has led to a deteriorating security situation in the Middle East. Jordan has been significantly impacted by these developments. Economic growth has been stunted due to the collapse of the tourism and trade sectors, further exacerbating an already grim economic situation marked by rising unemployment and poverty since 2011.

However, the primary concerns for Jordan have been predominantly political. While the surge in the popularity of Hamas among Jordanians following the 7 October attack poses the threat of uncontrollable interference in the country’s affairs by a Palestinian faction, the possibility that Israel might take advantage of the conflict to forcibly transfer Palestinians into Jordan has become a central issue on Jordan’s agenda. 

The following is an analysis of how Jordanian authorities have experienced and addressed these challenges as part of their broader efforts to establish Jordan as a fully sovereign and respected state in the Middle East.

Dealing with Hamas and Renewed Palestinian Activism in Jordan

Hamas’s armed resistance against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has garnered strong support among Jordanians of all origins, its approval rating doubling from 44 percent in December 2020 to 85 percent in December 2023. This strong popular support is expressed during weekly demonstrations across the country, in which pro-Hamas slogans like “All of Jordan is Hamas” can be heard.

Hamas’s popularity can be understood primarily as an identification with the plight of Gazans and a widespread condemnation of the atrocities Israel has committed against them since October 2023. It has also been driven by the feeling of restored dignity generated by Hamas’ military intervention, which cast doubt on the myth of Israeli invincibility. Finally, Hamas’s initiative has returned the Palestinian question to the centre of the international agenda after being marginalized by the suspended Oslo peace process between Israel and the PLO and the Abraham Accords between Israel and Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Sudan in 2020. 

Hamas was quick to reap the political rewards of this surge in popularity. Publicly positioning itself as the ultimate defender of the Palestinian cause, its leaders in Gaza and Qatar openly encouraged Jordanians to pressure the authorities to abrogate the 1994 peace treaty between Jordan and Israel and dismantle the 12 American military bases in the country. Without consulting the Jordanian authorities, they publicly suggested that if Qatar, their host country since 2012, were to ask them to leave, then Jordan — this “generous country, a land of resilience and mobilization” — would certainly welcome them, especially since most are Jordanian nationals.

For Jordan’s authorities, Hamas’s opportunistic statements were reminiscent of the excesses committed by PLO-affiliated Palestinian factions in the late 1960s, which led to the bloody events of Black September in 1970. More recently, the authorities closed Hamas’s offices in Amman in 1999, mainly because the latter’s political activities in the country had exceeded the gentleman's agreement concluded in 1993 — particularly regarding involvement in military operations in Palestine. Jordan’s concerns about Hamas have been exacerbated by the fact that the latter has received steady support from Iran since the early 1990s, a country designated as a state sponsor of terrorism by Jordan’s main Western allies, and that in 2004 King Abdullah identified as the linchpin of a “Shia Red Crescent“ likely to destabilize the Middle East.

Jordan made clear in the early days of Israel’s military retaliation that it would oppose any attempt to collectively displace Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank.

Caught between Hamas’s opportunistic behaviour and the popular outpouring of sympathy towards it, the Jordanian government has had to walk a fine line between aligning with its people and safeguarding state interests. On the one hand, it has sought to co-opt public sentiment. This strategy has involved strongly criticizing Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank and condemning — notably through the voice of Queen Rania — the double standards applied by the international community, which has shown greater sympathy for Israeli victims of 7 October than for Palestinian victims in Gaza. Jordan also established itself as one of the leading providers of emergency and medical aid to the Palestinians, including two field hospitals in Gaza and one in the West Bank. 

On the other hand, Jordan has also directly addressed Hamas’s “provocations”, accusing its leaders of behaving as if there were no legitimate state or authority in Jordan and, recalling the country’s troubled history with Palestinian factions, asserting it had no intention of re-opening the chapter on “Palestinian cells”. Jordan also dismissed calls by Hamas to annul its peace treaty with Israel. Moreover, while the Ministry of the Interior encourages the population to demonstrate against Israeli actions in Palestine, it has also issued warnings against demonstrations near the Israeli Embassy in Amman or at the Israeli border. Jordan’s most visible display of political and security sovereignty took place on 19 April and 1 October 2024 and more recently in June 2025, when it intercepted Iranian missiles and drones sent to Israel in Jordanian airspace, despite Iranian threats that Jordan could well be the next target. 

However, true to its tradition of moderate foreign policy and well aware of the strong anti-Israeli sentiment within its population, Jordan’s response to Hamas and Iran has not reached the point of no return. While King Abdullah condemned the October 2023 Hamas military attack during a visit to the United States, the Jordanian government has refrained from officially designating it as a “terrorist organization”. It later assured Iran that Jordan harboured no hostile intentions, but emphasized the need to ensure the security of its own population and protect its sovereignty.

Jordan’s attempts to reduce the influence of Hamas and Iran through soft confrontation, diplomacy, and limited military activity appear to have been effective. However, the Jordanian government’s efforts to suppress internal opposition groups with alleged ties to these foreign actors have continued unabated. Security forces have cracked down on demonstrators participating in banned protests such as those near the Israeli embassy in 2023 and 2024, when over 1,000 people were arrested.

A more troubling concern has been the rise of Hamas’s main ally in Jordan, the Islamic Action Front (IAF), the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. The IAF emerged as the country’s leading party in the September 2024 general elections, winning 31 out of 138 seats — a result widely interpreted as confirmation of popular support for Hamas. Yet, as a participant in Jordan’s strictly controlled political system, the IAF does not pose as significant a threat as its more autonomous parent organization, the Brotherhood, which operates a large number of social institutions and is believed to maintain covert ties with Hamas. In 2020, the authorities decided to formally disband the group after its failure to register as a charity. This decision was implemented in April 2025: following the alleged discovery of a Brotherhood plot to destabilize the country, the authorities seized all of its assets and banned the promotion of its ideology. It remains to be seen whether these steps will curb Islamist militancy or, conversely, fuel further extremism.

Countering Forced Palestinian Migration

The scale of Israel's reprisals in Gaza since October 2023, along with the simultaneous intensification of its repressive and annexationist policies in the West Bank, has raised fears of a massive transfer of Palestinians from these two territories to Jordan. This fear, intensified by statements of far-right Israeli ministers in favour of annexing the West Bank and Gaza, once again has less to do with the socio-economic impact of such a transfer — as seen during the recent Iraqi and Syrian refugee crises - than with its political implications. Such a scenario is unacceptable to Jordan, not only because it would violate Palestinians’ right to “freedom, sovereignty, and an independent state on their Palestinian homeland”, but also because it would help validate the narrative promoted by right-wing Israeli parties: that Jordan, rather than historic Palestine, should host the Palestinian homeland — at the expense of Hashemite rule. There are objective factors underlying the Israeli narrative: Jordan is the main host country for Palestinian refugees and is also the only Arab country to have collectively naturalized them, a policy implemented between 1949 and 1954. 

Jordan has responded to the Israeli assertions first by countering the widespread belief that Jordanians of Palestinian origin constitute the majority of the population: in 2002, the prime minister revealed that they represented “only” 43 percent of the population. Yet, as the head of the royal court stated in 2014, “any new wave of Palestinians would cause a demographic shift by increasing the proportion of Jordanians of Palestinian origin, thus giving credence to the idea widely held in Israel that Jordan is, in fact, the alternative state for Palestinians in Jordan”.

 While maintaining a firm opposition to any new transfer of Palestinians under the Trump plan, Jordan is working with Egypt to develop alternative solutions that will satisfy its American patron without neglecting the interests of Israel, Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and the people of Gaza.

Shaped by the Jordanian government’s tumultuous past relations with Palestinian factions, the fear of an alternative Palestinian state within Jordan is one of the reasons why the late King Hussein severed the country’s legal and administrative ties with the West Bank in July 1988, 38 years after Jordanian annexation and 21 years after Israel defeated Jordan in the Six-Day War, making it clear that, from now on, “Jordan was Jordan, Palestine was Palestine”. Moreover, in the early 2000s, Jordan ended its longstanding policy of collectively welcoming Palestinians into its territory: between 2000–2005, authorities restricted the arrival of West Bankers fleeing Israeli repression during the Second Intifada. In 2003–2004, they opposed the entry of Palestinians from Iraq escaping persecution by Shiite militias following the fall of the Baathist regime, under which they were considered protégés, and in 2012–2013 Jordan turned back Palestinian refugees with Syrian documents at the Syrian border. As the Jordanian Prime Minister explained in January 2013, “receiving those brothers would be a prelude to another wave of displacement, which is what the Israeli government wants”. 

In light of these concerns, Jordan made clear in the early days of Israel’s military retaliation that it would oppose any attempt to collectively displace Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank. Such an action would constitute a “red line” and a “declaration of war”. These warnings have become even more assertive since February 2025 following the United States’ announcement of a plan to transfer Gazans to Jordan and Egypt as a prelude to reconstructing Gaza as “the Riviera of the Middle East” under President Trump’s leadership, without guaranteeing their right to return to Gaza. The Jordanian Foreign Minister subsequently raised the possibility of going to war against Israel in order to prevent further “ethnic cleansing” in Palestine — a cost for that neither Jordan nor the Palestinians, he emphasized, were willing to bear.

That said, it is unlikely that Jordan would go to such extremes even in the event of a forced transfer of Palestinians into its territory. First, Jordanians recognize that they would be unable to effectively confront Israel either militarily or economically. Active diplomacy — including vocal protests, threats, and symbolic retaliatory steps like declaring the Israeli ambassador persona non grata in Amman as long as military operations in Gaza continue, or the suspension of joint water projects — remains the only meaningful leverage Jordan can exercise. This limited capacity for intervention is also explained by the need to preserve the benefits of the peace treaty it signed with Israel in 1994, which provides Jordan with significant advantages in terms of water and gas supplies, security cooperation around shared threats from Hamas and Iran, and recognition of Jordan’s politically and symbolically significant role as the custodian of holy sites in Jerusalem under Israeli occupation. 

The Jordanian state’s balancing act vis-à-vis Israel and its own domestic public opinion is mediated through the United States, its principal provider of military and economic assistance. While maintaining a firm opposition to any new transfer of Palestinians under the Trump plan, Jordan is working with Egypt to develop alternative solutions — both operational and political — that will satisfy its American patron without neglecting the interests of Israel, Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and the people of Gaza. This balancing act is essential to Jordan’s stability and survival.