Jordan pledges to foil Israeli deportation bid

By ABDUL JALIL MUSTAFA | ARAB NEWS

AMMAN: The Jordanian government on Wednesday vowed to foil any Israeli attempt to deport Palestinians to the Hashemite kingdom in implementation of military order 1650 that went into effect a week ago.

“Our embassy in Tel Aviv is closely following up the situation on the ground to monitor any tangible measures by the Israeli occupation authorities toward the implementation of the military order 1650,” Minister of State for Media Affairs Nabil Sharif told a weekly press conference.

“Jordan will not allow the Israeli occupation authorities under any pretext to deport any Palestinian from the West Bank or East Jerusalem to the kingdom as part of the hectic Israeli endeavors to change the demographic situation in the occupied territories,” he added.

Arab and Israeli media said that the ordinance 1650 allows the Israeli authorities to deport tens of thousands of Palestinians with no residence permits in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which the Jewish state seized from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war.

The move, which was labeled by Jordanian politicians and columnists as the most dangerous since the foundation of Israel in 1948, is widely perceived to be directed against Palestinians from the Hamas-controlled Gaza strip who live in the West Bank. Jordan, a country of limited resources and home to 1.9 million Palestinian refugees, stands to suffer profoundly as a result of any new mass deportations from the West Bank across the River Jordan.

Jordanian Prime Minister Samir Rifai, who accompanied King Abdallah on a visit to the United States last week, has raised Amman’s concerns in this respect during meetings with US Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell and other American officials, Sharif said.

“The Jordanian government reserves all diplomatic, political and legal choices in dealing with this decision which we consider as null and void and illegal because it was taken by an occupation authority,” he added.

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