Jordan Foils Terrorist Plot against Israelis

A handful of Jordanian citizens are currently on trial for allegedly planning suicide attacks against Israeli assets in the West Bank. “The state security court recently began legal proceedings against five people accused of involvement in a terrorist plot, which the intelligence unit foiled in February,” a Jordanian judicial source was quoted by media as saying. According to the unnamed official, one of the defendants in 2007 visited the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, where he was trained to make explosives. He is said to have returned to the Hashemite Kingdom in 2010, where seven years later he recruited the four others. They are charged with conspiring to infiltrate the West Bank and perpetrate attacks “with bombs against buses and trains and with explosive vests against other Israeli targets.” Some have postulated that word of the trial came only now due to ongoing tensions between Amman and Jerusalem over the latter’s plan to annex the Jordan Valley and Jewish communities located beyond the pre-1967 borders. King Abdullah II has intimated that such a move could prompt him to annul Jordan’s landmark 1994 peace agreement with the Jewish state. Bilateral security cooperation, in particular, has long been viewed as an integral part, if not the foundational element, of that deal.