Israeli farmers to quit leased Jordanian lands amid tensions

AMMAN - A deal dating from Israel's historic 1994 peace treaty with Jordan allowing Israeli farmers to lease two sites along their common border runs out Sunday but the tenants say that nobody has told them what happens the day after.

In the peace negotiations, Jordan agreed to lease the lands to Israel for a 25-year renewable period, with the Hashemite kingdom retaining sovereignty.

One of the sites is Baqura, a spit of land where the Jordan and Yarmuk rivers meet, which is called Naharayim in Hebrew.

The other site is Ghumar, located deep in the Negev desert south of the Dead Sea, known in Hebrew as Tzofar.

In October last year, Jordan's King Abdullah said his country had notified Israel that it wants to take them back.

Now with the deadline only hours away, Idan Grinbaum, head of the Israeli regional council for the Jordan Valley, says Jordanian officials have told him that as of Saturday night, the Naharayim site will be out of bounds.

"As of this time no Israeli official has met with us or issued a letter on the topic," he said in a statement to AFP news agency.

Grinbaum said that since Abdullah's October declaration "there were enough opportunities to change the decree but unfortunately that didn't happen".

The change would affect members of two agricultural communities who have been working the lands at hand for 70 years, "and feel that Israel has abandoned them," he said.

"It's very unfortunate that this is how we're departing from the Island of Peace," he said of Naharayim.

Asked for details, the Israeli foreign ministry sent the reply, "the agreement will expire on November 10th", without elaborating.

Strained relations

Since the heady days of the 1994 treaty, which made Jordan only the second country after Egypt to make peace with Israel, relations with Amman have been strained.

Opinion polls have repeatedly found that the peace treaty with Israel is overwhelmingly opposed by Jordanians, more than half of whom are of Palestinian origin.

In 2017, an Israeli embassy security guard in Amman killed two Jordanians, receiving a hero's welcome from Netanyahu after Jordan agreed to release him from detention.

Three years earlier, an Israeli soldier at a border crossing killed a Jordanian judge he deemed a threat.

Just last month, Amman recalled its ambassador from Israel over the prolonged detention without trial in the Zionist state of two Jordanians.

Israel has not commented on the reasons for their imprisonment, though Israeli media have said they were detained on suspicion of security-related offences.

They were freed and returned to Jordan on Wednesday and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said the Jordanian ambassador would return shortly.

Private television station Channel 13 reported Thursday that Netanyahu's National Security Advisor, Meir Ben-Shabbat, had met Monday in Amman with Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi who told him there would be no extension to the Naharayim and Tzofar leases.

Citing "senior sources" in Jordan, it said Safadi instead suggested that compensation be paid to the Israeli farmers for crops remaining at the sites after the handover.