Ali Younis
Drop Site News / November 9, 2024
[via email]
“I don’t find the Israeli accusations credible at all”
As the dust settles from the U.S. presidential election, many are speculating about how Donald Trump’s return to the White House will impact the Middle East.
Could things get worse in Palestine under Trump? Possibly. Although in Gaza, it’s difficult to see how. For over a year, Israel has waged a genocidal assault on Palestinians, not only without restraint from the Biden administration, but with a constant replenishment of funding and arms, as well as diplomatic cover. Israel has similarly been allowed to run rampant in Lebanon, unleashing many of the same tactics it is using in Gaza: mass forced displacement, high civilian casualties, targeting hospitals, flattening towns and villages.
In Iran, the potential for shifts in U.S. policy from Biden to Trump may appear more straightforward, with his reported appointment of Brian Hook, a major Iran hawk, to oversee the transition at the State Department. But that move might conflict with Trump’s campaign rhetoric promoting a more isolationist foreign policy.
What is clear is that Israel appears to have no intention of ramping down its brutal military campaigns in the region—with Iran in its crosshairs.
(Check out our latest podcast where the Drop Site News team gathered to discuss what we know about how Trump might handle Israel and what that will mean for war with Iran; who might lead the State Department; and the broader dynamics of the Middle East.)
Israel often tries to suggest any support for Palestinian resistance is driven by Iran. Its list of accusations includes claims that Iran is smuggling weapons through Jordan to Palestinian militants in the occupied West Bank.
Small arms are indeed making their way from Jordan to the West Bank, but in our latest story at Drop Site News, Ali Younes reports that those weapons are not coming from Iran but rather from the local arms trade in Jordan, where support for armed Palestinian resistance is widespread.
— Sharif Abdel Kouddous
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Story by Ali Younes
In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election on Tuesday, Israel’s newly appointed defense minister, Israel Katz, congratulated him in a social media post, writing that, together, the United States and Israel will “strengthen the U.S.-Israel alliance, bring back the hostages, and stand firm to defeat the axis of evil led by Iran.”
Within the Israeli establishment, Katz has also been one of the most prominent voices promoting the claim that Iran is smuggling weapons through Jordan to Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups in the occupied West Bank. “Iranian Revolutionary Guard units are collaborating with Hamas operatives in Lebanon to smuggle weapons and funds into Jordan with the aim of destabilizing the regime. From Jordan, these weapons are then smuggled across the eastern border, flooding Judea and Samaria, particularly refugee camps, with dangerous weapons and large sums of money,” he posted on Twitter in early August. Just over two weeks later, he repeated the claim, writing that “special units” of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps “smuggle weapons into the Kingdom of Jordan, mainly through the Syrian border, attempting to destabilize the regime and turn the Israel-Jordan border from a peaceful one into a volatile front.”
Katz is not alone in making these allegations. Several prominent U.S. and international media outlets have also asserted that Iran is using smuggling networks in Jordan to funnel weapons into the West Bank. These claims have commonly been used to bolster Israel’s justifications in its ongoing confrontations with Iran.
Yet several Jordanian sources with direct knowledge of smuggling operations to the West Bank told Drop Site News that such claims are either false or grossly exaggerate the reality. Drop Site interviewed Jordanian intelligence officials, an underground arms dealer in Amman, and a prominent Jordanian attorney who works on national security cases.
All the sources confirmed the existence of arms-smuggling networks from Jordan to the West Bank. But they said these weapons and funding come from the local underground Jordanian market—not Iran.
Colonel Nedal Abuzaid, a retired Jordanian military intelligence officer who received training in the U.S., said that Jordan’s northern border with Syria—the main route through which weapons from Iran would pass—is under heavy Jordanian control, with strict surveillance and monitoring systems in place. In 2009, the U.S. began helping to establish integrated border security, surveillance, detection, and interdiction systems along hundreds of miles of Jordan’s borders.
Abuzaid, who has direct knowledge of border operations, said that while drugs are smuggled from Syria into Jordan, the Israeli claim that Iran or its regional proxies have been smuggling weapons to the Palestinians through Jordanian territory is untrue. “It’s highly unlikely that weapons smugglers could make it through,” he said.
A senior Jordan Intelligence officer who spoke to Drop Site on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media echoed these assertions. Iran and its regional proxies have no weapons-smuggling networks in Jordan because of the immense difficulty in reaching Jordanian soil, he said. He added that Iran has used other regional routes to provide Palestinian resistance groups with much more sophisticated and heavy-caliber weapons systems, which cannot cross Jordanian border undetected due to their size.
The intelligence officer also said that smuggling weapons through Jordan could jeopardize Tehran’s diplomatic efforts to accrue “soft influence,” which include hosting dinners and receptions at the Iranian embassy in Amman for local politicians, journalists and parliamentarians. In addition, Jordanian intelligence officials maintain close surveillance on Iranian personnel in the country, making it all the more difficult to run weapons smuggling networks undetected.
For those in the West Bank seeking arms, one of the main sources is the local Jordanian weapons market, an underground arms dealer in Amman who goes by the pseudonym Abu Ahmed told Drop Site. (He declined to give his full name because of the illegal nature of his business.) That market, in turn, relies on local weapons manufacturing as well as commercial smuggling from bordering countries, including Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
Abu Ahmed said small arms, like handguns and assault rifles, are purchased from Jordanian dealers such as himself by individuals with the intention of smuggling them into the West Bank. These include Glock pistols, M4 Carbine rifles, pump-action rifles, and automatic weapons.
Like many other Jordanians, Abu Ahmed said that he is sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians, and often charges a reduced price or sells at cost if he is certain that the weapons are intended for armed Palestinian groups fighting the Israeli occupation and not just for commercial gain. Prices for weapons and other consumer goods in Jordan are considerably less than in the West Bank, creating opportunities for entrepreneurs on both sides of the border to smuggle weapons for profit.
Historically, Jordanian tribes have long smuggled weapons to Palestinians: first to take on British forces who occupied Palestine and much of the region after World War I and, later, to fight armed Zionist groups. Members of Jordanian tribes also joined in the struggle against British and Zionist forces during those years.
After Israel’s establishment in 1948, Jordan annexed the West Bank and granted Jordanian citizenship to all Palestinians under its rule. After 1967, when Israel invaded and occupied the West Bank, smuggling routes from Jordan into Palestine remained in operation. Members of the Jordanian tribes tended to be at the forefront of the smuggling operations because the routes run through their lands.
In 1994, Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel and the two countries. Since then, the two nations have deepened their military and security ties.
Jordan’s borders with Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories is over 200 miles long. Jordanian authorities have increasingly tried to clamp down on weapons smuggling across the border since the launch of Israel’s war on Gaza and as Israeli military and settler violence ramped up across the West Bank.
Moussa al-Abdallat, a prominent defense attorney in Amman known for taking on cases involving national security offenses, has represented numerous defendants facing weapons smuggling charges. He said there are currently over 50 open cases in Jordanian courts involving people accused of weapons smuggling into the occupied Palestinian territories.
“As far as the legal system is concerned, there were no Iranian cells or cells belonging to Hezbollah or even from Iraqi groups uncovered inside Jordan involved in smuggling weapons into occupied Palestine,” Abdallat said, adding that all the cases involve local arms smugglers. “There is no weapons smuggling from the Syrian territories, or from Iran, or from the Lebanese group Hezbollah, into Jordan with the intention of sending it to the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.”
Abdallat is currently representing several men the Jordanian government has accused of attempting to smuggle weapons to the West Bank. He also pointed to a case from last June in which Jordanian authorities arrested 10 people on suspicion of attempting to smuggle weapons to Hamas in the West Bank, seven of whom were later released. All of them were local smugglers without a connection to Iran, including Palestinians who came from the West Bank, and local Jordanians.
Jordanian courts typically sentence those accused of smuggling weapons to three years in jail. But since the start of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, weapons smuggling sentences have increased to 7 to 10 years.
Another case Abdallat worked on last year involved two Palestinian men from the West Bank who were arrested by Jordanian authorities as they tried to smuggle weapons across the border. He said they were heavily tortured in Jordanian custody causing one of the men to lose vision in one eye.
Israel’s claims that Iran is smuggling weapons into occupied Palestine through Jordan are a way to both escalate accusations against Tehran for possible future military attacks and to maintain political pressure on Amman, according to Sean Yom, an associate professor of political science at Temple University and a senior fellow in the Middle East program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
“Israel is using and abusing Jordan because Jordan is a trusted US ally and has a US military presence in its territory and by bringing an Iranian presence into the picture it will raise some western eyebrows about Jordan,” Yom said. “I don’t find the Israeli accusations credible at all.”
Ali Younes is a veteran journalist covering US national security issues and the Middle East
