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A Chapter of: The Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and Bedouin Gun Runners

The Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood

Founded in 1945, the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood (JMB) is Jordan’s oldest political party. Throughout its existence, the group has undergone profound shifts—from a loyal opposition movement that stood by the monarchy during times of turmoil to a close Iranian partner. The JMB’s own relationship to Iran has largely mirrored that of Hamas, a Palestinian militant group that emerged from Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood networks in 1987 and has exerted varying degrees of control over the JMB since 2002.

In recent years, many Palestinian JMB members have operated as extensions of Hamas in Jordan by smuggling weapons to Hamas cells in the West Bank and by carrying out propaganda efforts in support of the organization. In some cases, JMB weapons smugglers were directly recruited by Saleh al-Arouri, Hamas’s commander for the West Bank based in Turkey and Lebanon, who regularly liaised with Iran and led the Hamas delegation that met with Ayatollah Khamenei in July 2019.99

As Hamas’s relationship with Iran shifted throughout the twenty-first century, so too did the JMB’s, with the group becoming a silent partner in Tehran’s broader regional trafficking networks in the period from 2021 to 2024. However, throughout these shifts, the JMB maintained a large degree of autonomy, operating as an independent node in a decentralized network of actors, which Iran provided material support for but could not exercise direct command and control over, unlike Tehran’s Shi’a proxies in Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere.

This section of the report will detail the dynamics that drove the JMB’s shift beginning in 1970 and ending with major crackdowns against its leadership in 2006 and 2014–2015. It will then analyze how emerging rivalries between Jordan and the Arab Gulf states created an opening that the group exploited to reestablish its influence in 2021 and help advance Iranian interests until 2024.

Syria, Iran, Palestine: Jordan’s Fragile Balancing Act

Since 1970, Jordan has viewed the growth of Palestinian militancy within its borders as the top threat to its national security. In September of that year, Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) militias in Jordan, led by Yasser Arafat and backed by the Ba’athist regime in Syria, fought a short civil war that left thousands dead. Syrian soldiers intervened on the side of the PLO and captured Irbid, Jordan’s second-largest city, before being expelled by a Jordanian counteroffensive.100 The JMB sided with the monarchy during the clashes, later dubbed Black September, and afterwards voluntarily dismantled a network of bases it operated in Jordan that it used to carry out attacks against Israel.101

The events left a permanent stain on the Jordanian consciousness and radically altered the government’s relationship with its citizens, in particular with naturalized Palestinian refugees and their descendants who make up half of Jordan’s population. In the years after Black September, security forces unleashed a wave of repression against Palestinians in Jordan, purging them from the country’s armed forces, intelligence apparatus, and state bureaucracy, all of which came to be staffed almost exclusively by “East Bankers”—native Jordanians whose ancestry hails from areas east of the Jordan River. Over the next several decades, preventing similar uprisings became the top priority for Jordan’s security services and domestic policymakers; as a result, Palestinians remained largely excluded from political life.102

The political fortunes of Palestinian-origin Jordanians changed in the 1990s when the JMB began to absorb a larger number of Palestinian members.103 This demographic change occurred alongside a hard-line ideological shift within the JMB that revived the threat of renewed militancy in Jordan for the first time since 1970. Both shifts were driven by two key developments. The first was the return, starting in 1989, of Jordanian jihadists who had fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan under the command of Abdullah Azzam, himself a JMB member of Palestinian origin. Throughout the 1980s, Azzam was a major fundraiser and logistical coordinator of Arab mujahideen forces in Afghanistan and a personal mentor to Osama bin Laden.104 

Following the launch of the First Intifada in 1987, Azzam became an ideological and financial supporter of Hamas, allowing the group’s fighters to train at mujahideen bases in Afghanistan while promoting Palestine as the next front line for jihadists after the defeat of the Soviet Union.105 Upon returning home, many Jordanian mujahideen who fought under Azzam settled in Zarqa, a large suburb northeast of the capital city Amman, which for decades had served as a center for Salafist scholars and was also home to a large Palestinian refugee population.106 

Second, Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait forced nearly 200,000 Palestinian citizens of Jordan living in Kuwait to flee, with an estimated 160,000 settling in Zarqa.107 Included within this wave were large numbers of Hamas members, including the group’s top leadership, whose Political Bureau was based in Kuwait from 1987 to 1990 and for the next nine years would instead be headquartered in Jordan.108 

The influx of Palestinians from Kuwait led to the growth of a Palestinian bloc within the JMB that was significantly more militant than their East Bank counterparts. This in turn led to a discernable hawkish-dovish divide within the JMB along ethnic lines, primarily over the extent to which the organization should openly espouse anti-Israel and anti-American rhetoric and cooperate with the Jordanian state.109 A key leader of the hawkish wing was Ibrahim al-Mashwakhi, the son of a displaced Palestinian Bedouin from the Negev Desert who was born and grew up in the Gaza Strip. 

In his later teen years, al-Mashwakhi relocated to Jordan, where he joined the JMB and became close with Abdullah Azzam. Throughout the 1980s, al-Mashwakhi was based in Zarqa and traveled to Afghanistan to liaise with the Afghan mujahideen on behalf of the JMB’s “Jihad Office.”110 

The divide between the JMB’s hawkish and dovish wings widened in 1994, when Jordan’s King Hussein signed a formal peace treaty with Israel. The treaty was subsequently ratified by Jordan’s parliament, in which the JMB’s formal political party, the Islamic Action Front (IAF), then held a plurality. The failure of IAF parliamentarians to block the treaty’s passage strengthened the position of the hawkish members within the JMB, many of whom questioned the utility of political participation, called for a boycott of elections, and openly sympathized with jihadist groups that had grown in popularity since the return of Arab mujahideen from Afghanistan.111 

From 1991 to 1994, Jordan saw a surge of violent jihadist terrorist attacks, with four newly formed homegrown organizations attempting assassinations of Jordanian officials and bombings of Western targets. During the same time, Abu Musa’ab al-Zarqawi—who later led Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)—became involved with Bayat al-Imam, a loose network of militant Salafists that may have been involved in planning at least one failed violent attack inside Jordan.112

To contain the growing divide between the JMB’s hawkish and dovish wings, a third faction—known as the “Centrist Bloc”—gained prominence in 1994 after performing well in internal JMB elections held that year, winning key seats within the JMB Executive Bureau along with the position of general overseer. Over the next several years, the JMB’s Centrist Bloc leadership worked hard to appease the group’s hawkish wing and, in 1997, boycotted parliamentary elections. This decision angered more dovish East Bank JMB members, who were disproportionately employed in Jordan’s public sector and reliant on connections to political representatives to secure jobs. As a result, over the next several years, many East Bank members defected from the JMB, leaving hard-line members with even greater influence within the organization.113  

Radical sentiment within the JMB grew further in 1999, when the newly crowned king, Abdullah II, expelled Hamas’s leadership from Jordan. The group’s leadership relocated to Qatar before reestablishing its headquarters in Syria.114 

By 2002, two years after the launch of the Second Intifada, a faction of the JMB openly tied to Hamas and led by Humam Sa’id, Zaki Bani Arshid, and others won partial control of the group’s Executive Bureau and Shura Council during internal elections along with the position of secretary general of the IAF.115 In parliamentary elections held in June 2003, 14 of the 17 IAF candidates who won seats were Palestinian, most of whom came from the JMB’s pro-Hamas wing.116 Among those 14 MPs were Ibrahim al-Mashwakhi, who shortly before being nominated as an IAF candidate had been detained and accused of trafficking weapons to Hamas and helping to finance the group’s weapons purchases, though he was never formally charged.117 

Jordan’s monarchy began to view the rise of the JMB’s pro-Hamas faction with particular concern between May 2005 and January 2006 when Islamists—including Hizbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas—performed well in legislative elections in Lebanon, Egypt, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip, respectively.118 In Lebanon and Gaza, these gains failed to moderate the groups’ activity, with Hizbollah provoking a war with Israel in July 2006 and Hamas seizing control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007.119 At the time, both groups maintained a presence in Syria, whose regime, led by Bashar al-Assad, allowed Hizbollah, Hamas, al-Qaeda, and other militant organizations to use the country as a logistical headquarters.120

In the lead-up to Jordanian parliamentary elections in November 2007, JMB and IAF leaders expressed support for Hizbollah’s and Hamas’s 2006–2007 military operations, along with Iran’s and the Assad regime’s broader efforts to confront U.S. power in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.121 For Jordan’s monarchy, the region suddenly appeared to resemble the period prior to Black September, with the Assad regime in Syria backed by the Islamist regime in Iran serving as patrons that could support a JMB-led uprising in Jordan similar to Ba’athist support for the secular-leftist PLO in 1970. 

These fears were exacerbated by an uptick in terror attacks inside Jordan that generated support among some JMB members, including the November 9, 2005, bombings in Amman carried out by AQI that killed 60 people and wounded 115. Dubbed Jordan’s 9/11, these attacks targeted three hotels frequented by Westerners and were masterminded by AQI leader al-Zarqawi.122 Later, on April 18, 2006, security forces arrested 20 Hamas members in possession of IEDs and rockets smuggled into Jordan from Syria, allegedly intended for use against Jordanian intelligence targets in Zarqa’s al-Hashemia district.123 

Both events attracted scrutiny onto the JMB due to its ties to Hamas as well as later statements made by its members that appeared supportive of al-Zarqawi after he was killed by U.S. troops in Iraq on June 7, 2006. One such figure was Muhammad Abd al-Qadr Abu Faris, an IAF parliamentarian and prominent JMB Salafist who delivered a sermon three days after al-Zarqawi’s death describing him as a “martyr.”124 That day, four other IAF parliamentarians, including Ibrahim al-Mashwakhi, the party’s representative from Zarqa, attended a funeral for al-Zarqawi held in the city.125

For Jordan’s monarchy, the presence of al-Mashwakhi and other JMB members at the funeral was a watershed moment. For the first time since Black September, there appeared to exist a Palestinian-led movement in the country with access to weapons that openly supported groups committing violence against the state. Within days, security forces launched a major crackdown against the JMB and IAF that aimed to weaken both groups’ ability to compete in elections. 

First, just days after the funeral, al-Mashwakhi and other IAF parliamentarians who attended al-Zarqawi’s funeral were arrested.126 Later, in July 2006, authorities seized the Islamic Center Society, the JMB’s largest charity, which generated around a third of the group’s revenue.127 Over the next year, authorities blocked the appointment of JMB members at universities and religious institutions, passed an anti-terror law that expanded their ability to arrest critics, and forced the JMB to divest from Zarqa University, a private college that it controlled.128

Unsurprisingly given the crackdown, in parliamentary elections held in November 2007, the IAF won just six of 110 seats, its worst performance ever. The results served as the death blow for the JMB’s moderate wing, with pro-Hamas leader Humam Sa’id formally taking over the organization in April 2008.129 Under Sa’id’s leadership, the JMB and IAF boycotted parliamentary and municipal elections.130 Following the 2011 Arab Spring, many feared that the group might adopt a transnational jihadist ideology similar to al-Qaeda and, later, ISIS in Syria, particularly in the wake of statements by Sa’id in January 2013 describing Jordan as a “state within the Muslim Caliphate.”131 

Jordan’s fears about a transnational threat from the JMB received a boost in November 2014, when security services arrested 31 JMB members accused of trafficking weapons to the West Bank.132 The arrests came three months after Israel arrested 93 individuals in the West Bank. According to Israel, the men were planning armed activity organized by Hamas’s Saleh al-Arouri, received weapons smuggled from Jordan, and were financed by Hamas operatives in Zarqa.133 

The arrests in Jordan marked a major political shift for the JMB and gave rise to a second crackdown on the group that began in March 2015.134 That month, Jordanian courts granted operating licenses to the “Muslim Brotherhood Society,” a new group made up of moderate East Bank JMB defectors that was given control of the IAF and began issuing statements using the JMB name and logo.135 Not long after, in July 2015, 12 of the 31 JMB members arrested on weapons trafficking charges were given sentences of up to 15 years, far harsher penalties than those given to traffickers in previous years.136 By February 2016, the JMB organization led by Humam al-Sa’id was declared illegal, and in April 2016, its offices in the capital Amman and several other large cities were raided.137

Under the JMB’s new leadership, the group continued to perform poorly in elections, losing significant votes in Palestinian constituencies.138 However, the events of the 2020s provided the JMB one final opening to assert itself within Jordan’s political sphere.

Jordan and the Saudis: Friends Become Foes

On April 3, 2021, King Abdullah II’s half-brother and former Crown Prince Hamzah bin Hussein was arrested for allegedly plotting a failed coup to unseat the monarchy in cooperation with Saudi Arabia. According to Jordanian officials, the failed putsch was masterminded by Bassem Awadallah, former chief of the Royal Jordanian Hashemite Court and top economic advisor to King Abdullah II throughout the 2000s. Awadallah had overseen the privatization of numerous public sector assets throughout the decade.139

By the 2010s, Awadallah founded and led the Tomoh Advisory consultancy in Dubai and became a key advisor to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), purportedly obtaining Saudi citizenship.140 According to Jordanian officials, in the days leading up to the coup attempt, security services intercepted separate calls between Awadallah, Crown Prince Hamzah, and MBS, in which the participants allegedly discussed exploiting economic dissatisfaction within Jordan to destabilize the country and orchestrate regime change.141 

Days after the failed putsch, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan led a delegation to Jordan and reportedly pressed King Abdullah II for the release of Awadallah, who had been arrested alongside Crown Prince Hamzah on April 3.142

The coup plot was notable in that it purportedly involved high-ranking notables from Jordan’s most prominent East Bank families and tribes with ties to the armed forces, at least a dozen of whom were arrested alongside Hamzah, though later released. In particular, members of the al-Majali and al-Fayez households, two clans that had traditionally been the royal family’s most powerful and loyal supporters since Jordan’s founding in 1921, were among those arrested.143 

The coup plot was the most serious challenge to the monarchy’s grip on power since Black September. The fact that it was led by East Bankers also presented a new challenge. Despite East Bankers having served as the regime’s core constituency since its founding, dissent had gradually been brewing since the 1990s due to repeated waves of austerity and privatization that forced Jordan to downsize its public sector, which had served as the largest employer of East Bankers since Black September. Cuts had even been extended to key units of the armed forces and the military pension system, leading to increased poverty and unemployment. By the time of the Arab Spring, East Bankers had become the lead organizers of anti-government “Hirak” (Movement) protests that involved organizations of retired military veterans.144 

As of now, claims of Riyadh’s involvement in the coup attempt are unconfirmed, while its potential motivations for supporting regime change remain the subject of speculation. However, by the time of the coup attempt, relations between Saudi Arabia and Jordan had already begun to deteriorate. Tensions first emerged in 2015, when Jordan refused to deploy troops to Yemen to take part in the Saudi-led coalition against the Iranian-backed Houthis.145

In 2016, both countries became bitterly divided over plans by the Trump administration to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that might allow Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to expand their influence in East Jerusalem’s Old City. Jordan’s custodianship of Jerusalem’s Muslim and Christian holy sites—notably the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock, in addition to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—not only provided the monarchy a form of religious legitimacy, it served as a pretext for and a means of maintaining significant intelligence and commercial interests in the West Bank, an area crucial for its national security. Starting in 2016 and increasingly in 2019, the monarchy feared that Saudi support for Trump’s peace plan was intended to usurp Jordan’s status as custodian of these locations, adding them to the list of religious pilgrimage sites already overseen by the Saudis in Mecca and Medina.146 Throughout this period, Jordan remained a staunch opponent of the Trump plan, which was never implemented and later unanimously rejected by Arab League states, including Saudi Arabia.147 

Around the same time, in April 2016, Saudi Arabia and Jordan announced the creation of the Saudi-Jordanian Coordination Council, a body whose formation was negotiated by Bassem Awadallah, then Jordan’s special envoy to Riyadh. The council aimed to channel billions of dollars of Saudi investment into Aqaba, a Jordanian port city and special economic zone. Located adjacent to Saudi Arabia’s Tabuk province, the proposed site for MBS’s Neom City launched in 2017, many suspected that the Saudi-Jordanian Coordination Council served as a means to integrate Aqaba into the Neom City project as part of Riyadh’s broader Vision 2030 agenda. However, by 2018, investment into the project failed to materialize, and Awadallah was removed as Jordan’s envoy to Saudi Arabia.148

The largest point of contention dividing Saudi Arabia and Jordan in the late 2010s centered around Jordan’s thawing relations with Qatar, Riyadh’s rival and a major backer of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. Jordanian relations with Qatar had been tense since 1999, when the monarchy expelled Hamas’s leadership from the country. During the 2000s, Qatar publicly sentenced a Jordanian to death on charges of espionage and advocated against Jordan in the United Nations and other multilateral institutions. In 2012, Qatar threatened to expel 40,000 Jordanian nationals working in the country unless King Abdullah II agreed to personally meet with and allow the chairman of Hamas’s Political Bureau, Khalid Mesha’al, to travel to Jordan.149 

Despite this, in June 2017, when Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Bahrain established a full economic blockade on Qatar, Jordan appeared reluctant to fully participate. Other than revoking Al Jazeera’s broadcasting license and downgrading Qatar’s diplomatic status, little changed between both countries, with bilateral trade, investment, and travel continuing apace.150 Jordan’s hesitancy to fully support the blockade was driven primarily by economic considerations and necessity: Since the Arab Spring, Jordan’s debt-to-GDP ratio has risen significantly, while instability in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and elsewhere had disrupted Jordanian trade, reduced remittances and tourism, caused an energy crisis, and forced the country to take in millions of Syrian refugees, requiring billions in additional state spending.151

From 2012 to 2016, Jordan weathered these crises in part through a $5 billion aid package provided by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait. However, by 2017, these states refused to renew their aid, forcing Jordan to look elsewhere for financial assistance.152 By June 2018, following the failure of the Saudi-Jordanian Coordination Council to generate investment, Jordan secured its first-ever large aid package from Qatar. The $500 million package also included pledges to provide 10,000 jobs in Qatar for Jordanian citizens.153

By 2019, Jordan had reversed the limited diplomatic sanctions it imposed on Qatar in 2017, with both countries formally exchanging ambassadors and signing several bilateral agreements on military cooperation.154

The April 2021 coup attempt in which Riyadh was allegedly involved accelerated Jordan’s shift away from Saudi Arabia and pushed the monarchy to look for ways to restructure its domestic balance of power, both to marginalize the traditional East Bank elite—parts of which had allegedly participated in the coup plot—and to empower groups associated with Qatar. The monarchy accomplished both in June 2021, when King Abdullah II appointed a committee to draft a new electoral law that was implemented in April 2022 and gave structural advantages to the JMB and IAF in future elections.155

The new law required that 41 of 138 seats in parliament be reserved for a newly created “national electoral district,” a constituency that voters from all over the country could vote in. Prior to the passage of this law, all candidates running for seats in Jordan’s parliament campaigned in local electoral districts whose boundaries corresponded with local municipal borders. The changes further stipulated that the 41 national electoral district seats could only be contested by candidates from political parties, not by independents.156 Though seemingly trivial, this change signaled an unprecedented political shift, as independents had held more than 80 percent of the seats in parliament since 1993, most held by East Bank leaders elected along kinship lines.157  

For most of the period prior to April 2022, the IAF was the only large political party in the country and often the only party to contest elections. As a result, the new law gave an extreme advantage to the IAF in elections scheduled for September 2024, because it was the only group in the country with decades of experience appealing to diverse voters in multiple districts on an ideological rather than kinship-based platform.158

That the monarchy would empower the JMB so soon after its 2015 crackdown on the group came as a shock to many. However, Jordan’s domestic balance of power had shifted significantly since then, with the JMB remaining firmly in the hands of loyalist East Bank families that posed less of a threat to the monarchy.159

Strengthening the JMB sent a clear signal to Saudi Arabia, a long-time opponent of the global Muslim Brotherhood and its branches, which Riyadh, with Abu Dhabi, had formally designated as a terrorist organization in 2014.160 Empowering the JMB also sent a clear warning to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose right-wing coalition regularly called for Israel to annex parts of the West Bank, a move that would likely trigger a new wave of Palestinian refugees into Jordan and destabilize the country’s fragile demographic balance.161 Despite being controlled by a moderate faction, the JMB as an organization had long extended moral support to Palestinian armed groups engaged in violence against Israel. Strengthening the group served as a clear way for Jordan’s monarchy to signal its position toward the Netanyahu government while maintaining plausible deniability.

However, as Jordanian-Israeli tensions over the West Bank increased throughout the 2020s, Jordanian officials would increasingly speak in more direct terms on the subject. In an interview on state television in September 2023, Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi clearly stated that Jordan would consider any attempt by Israel to expel Palestinians from the West Bank as “a declaration of war, and we’ll go to war. We cannot stand idly by and allow certain things to occur, because they undermine the Jordanian state.”162

Free Rein

In the aftermath of the April 2021 failed coup and the passage of the country’s new electoral law, Jordanian authorities granted the JMB, IAF, and even Hamas officials a conspicuous level of impunity to carry out subversive activities and promote an agenda of explicit radicalism that would have been unprecedented during previous crackdowns. That year, JMB members began traveling to Lebanon, where they allegedly received training from Hamas or Hizbollah operatives in missile production, activities that Jordan’s security services were purportedly well aware of. 

Speaking on the issue four years later at a press conference following the arrest of JMB weapons manufacturers in April 2025, Jordanian Minister of Communications Muhammad al-Mumani stated, “The General Intelligence Directorate (GID) thwarted plans that aimed to harm Jordanian national security…via a program of surveillance carried out…since 2021. This is an important year, my brothers. In other words, [this matter] began four years ago, with surveillance…carried out [over a span of] four years.”163

Security services further failed to take significant disruptive action against the group in 2022, when trained JMB operatives returned from Lebanon and built two missile production workshops outside Amman.164 Between May 2023 and March 2024, Jordanian security services did arrest 10 JMB-aligned weapons traffickers, although the majority were subsequently released, including Abd al-Rahman al-Mashwakhi, son of former IAF parliamentarian Ibrahim al-Mashwakhi. Of those detained, nearly all were Palestinian-origin JMB members, including an individual with family ties to Hamas militants in the West Bank.165

Amman released these detainees despite a similar uptick in arrests by Israeli security forces of Jordanians who had infiltrated the West Bank during the same period. From December 2023 to March 2024, Israeli security forces arrested six Jordanians, including two confirmed JMB members, on terrorism and weapons trafficking charges. One of them, Abdullah al-Zaytawi, was among the 12 JMB members arrested in November 2014 and sentenced on weapons trafficking charges in July 2015.166 

In the years leading up to these arrests, the monarchy’s openness to the JMB also appeared to also extend to Hamas itself. On August 12, 2022, three days before the formation of the Lion’s Den faction by Hamas leaders in Nablus, the former chairman of Hamas’s Political Bureau, Khalid al-Mesha’al, began a two-week tour of Jordan, meeting with leaders of security services and various public figures, many of whom called on the monarchy to reestablish ties with the group.167 

The apparent free rein granted to JMB and Hamas operatives during this period emboldened JMB leadership to speak more openly regarding their support for militancy. In January 2023, when interviewed during a pro-Palestine protest, IAF Chairman Murad al-Adhayla openly told cameras, “We [the JMB] call on the Jordanian government to help [arm the resistance]…and facilitate the flow of weapons into the West Bank.”168 

Following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack and the resultant Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, the political salience of the JMB’s message in support for Palestinian armed groups grew, driving further support for the IAF in the lead-up to the September 2024 parliamentary elections.169 When formal campaigning for the parliamentary elections began in 2024, IAF candidates adopted Hamas slogans and symbols on billboards and in literature, portraying a vote for the party as support for Hamas.170 Unsurprisingly, the IAF performed extremely well in the September 2024 elections, winning 31 of 138 seats, its best showing ever, becoming the largest party in parliament.171 

Rather than moderating the JMB, the IAF’s victory emboldened the group, whose members immediately escalated their militant activities. On October 18, 2024, two days after the death of Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s commander in Gaza, two JMB members wearing Jordanian army uniforms crossed into Israel and fired on Israeli reservists before being killed. 

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, JMB spokesman Moaz al-Khawalda stated that both the attackers were JMB members who regularly took part in “protests in solidarity with Gaza and the resistance.” At the same time, official JMB social media accounts shared a press release in which the group claimed responsibility for the attack and threatened to carry out more if the Jordanian state failed to cut ties with Israel. Hours later, however, following threats from intelligence and state officials, the group issued a second press release walking back their previous statement, claiming the attackers operated alone.172 

Though certainly not the first cross-border raid carried out from Jordan, the assault was the first instance of the JMB claiming responsibility for an attack on Israel since 1970 and of an Iranian partner publicly acknowledging having done so from within Jordanian territory.173 Through this attack, Iran and its allies were signaling to Israel that the gap separating its proxies in Syria and the West Bank had begun to be narrow.

A person in military uniform loads a rocket into a multiple rocket launcher system at dusk, with an armored vehicle visible in the background.
The Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and Bedouin Gun Runners
Citations
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  5. Mohammad Abu Rumman and Neven Bondokji, “How and Why Has the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan Changed Since 2011?,” Middle East Journal 74, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 42, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26933138.
  6. Wisam Hazimah, “The Political Survival of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan: From Participation to Boycott” (PhD thesis, University of East Anglia, June 2015), 56, 130, 151–2, 180, 198, https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/58569/1/W.H_Thesis_Final_Amended.pdf.
  7. Thomas Hegghammer, The Caravan, Abdallah Azzam and the Rise of Global Jihad, (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 26, 27, 430–4.
  8. Hazimah, “Political Survival of the Muslim Brotherhood,” 151–2, https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/58569/1/W.H_Thesis_Final_Amended.pdf.
  9. Stateless Again: Palestinian-Origin Jordanians Deprived of Their Nationality (Human Rights Watch, February 2010), https://www.hrw.org/report/2010/02/01/stateless-again/palestinian-origin-jordanians-deprived-their-nationality; Hazimah, “Political Survival of the Muslim Brotherhood,” 153, https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/58569/1/W.H_Thesis_Final_Amended.pdf.
  10. “Ibrahim Ghosheh Publishes His Memoirs,” Ammoun, November 8, 2008, https://www.ammonnews.net/article/30338; “What Stages Have Jordan and Hamas’ Relationship Passed Through,” Husna, June 29, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/mr2bab5j.
  11. Abu Rumman and Bondokji, “How and Why Has the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan Changed?,” 42, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26933138; Mohammad Suliman Abu Rumman, “The Muslim Brotherhood in the 2007 Jordanian Parliamentary Elections: A Passing ‘Political Setback’ or Diminished Popularity?,” Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, November 2007, 36; Hazimah, “Political Survival of the Muslim Brotherhood,” 146, https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/58569/1/W.H_Thesis_Final_Amended.pdf.
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  75. “Israeli Military Says It Killed Two Attackers Crossing from Jordan’s Dead Sea Area,” Reuters, October 18, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-military-says-it-identified-number-terrorists-crossing-jordan-south-dead-2024-10-18/; Mohammad Ersan, “Jordan: Authorities Arrest Relatives of Shooters of Israeli Soldiers in Dead Sea Attack,” Middle East Eye, October 29, 2024, https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/jordan-authorities-arrest-shooters-israeli-soldiers-cross-border-attack.

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The Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood

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