Jordan scraps water-for-energy deal with Israel
Amman says long-standing ties with Tel Aviv cannot move forward while the Israeli army 'continues to kill children in Gaza'
Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi announced on 16 November that a water-for-energy deal signed with Israel will not move forward in light of Tel Aviv's brutal ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza.
“We will not sign this agreement any longer. Can you imagine a Jordanian minister sitting next to an Israeli minister to sign a water and electricity agreement, all while Israel continues to kill children in Gaza?” asked the top diplomat during an interview with Al-Jazeera.
Signed in November 2021 in Dubai under the auspices of the US, the water-for-energy deal called for Israel to build a desalination plant in Jordan in exchange for electricity generated by a solar power plant built by an Emirati company.
Speaking about the 1994 peace agreement signed with Israel, Safadi said Amman “will not hesitate” to do “anything” to support the Palestinian people.
“We [Jordan] signed the peace agreement in 1994 after the signing of the Oslo Accords as part of a wider Arab effort to establish a two-state solution. That has not been achieved. Instead, Israel has not upheld its part of the agreement. [The peace deal] will now be a document on one of the shelves covered in dust."
"Israel is pushing the entire region into hell, and this war cannot continue," Safadi added. "We see the [occupied] West Bank is on fire, and we see settlement terrorism and the northern front with Lebanon escalating [...] What Israel is doing has created an environment of hatred amid which there cannot be normal, peaceful relations."
"We have a people that we respect. We have public opinion and positions as a Jordanian state," he stressed.
Safadi's comments come less than a week after Jordanian police arrested 25 men who were planning to hold a sit-in protest at a mosque near Jordan's border with Palestine.
The Jordanian state came under fire last month for heavily repressing protests near the Israel embassy in Amman. Despite the heavy-handed response from authorities, the country has seen massive mobilizations in support of Gaza.
As public pressure mounted, at the start of this month, Jordan recalled its ambassador to Israel.
“Israel’s aggression and crimes [in Gaza] can no longer be justified as self-defense. It has been killing innocent civilians and attacking hospitals,” the Jordanian foreign minister said during his Thursday interview.
“If any other state had committed a fraction of what Israel is doing now, we would have seen sanctions imposed on it from every corner of the globe,” Safadi added.