AMMAN (Dispatches) – The longest-serving Jordanian prisoner in an Israeli jail has arrived home after completing a 20-year sentence for alleged planting of a bomb on a bus in the occupied territories.
Abdullah Abu Jaber, 44, was arrested after the explosive device went off on the bus in Tel Aviv and injured more than a dozen people in December 2000.
He was one of the thousands of Jordanians who found casual work in the occupied territories after his country normalized ties with the occupying regime in a treaty in 1994.
Abu Jaber, who was among 22 prisoners held in the Zionist regime’s jails, headed to his parents’ home in the teeming Baqaa Palestinian refugee camp near the Jordanian capital Amman, witnesses said.
Separately, foreign ministry officials said the Zionist regime had dropped charges against two Jordanians who were arrested last month for allegedly crossing into the occupied territories.
The authorities had put them on trial shortly after their arrest.
Last month, Jordan witnessed large protests against the occupying regime’s military campaign in Gaza and its crackdown on Palestinian worshippers and protesters in al-Quds’ Al-Aqsa Mosque compound.
Political ties between the two sides have been strained over the regime’s treatment of the Palestinians, and the Jordanian government has faced growing public pressure to scrap the unpopular 1994 treaty.
Most of Jordan’s 10 million citizens are of Palestinian origin. They, or their parents, were expelled or fled to Jordan in the 1948 after the occupation of their homeland.
They have close family ties with their kins on the other side of the Jordan River in the occupied West Bank and East al-Quds, both occupied by the Zionist regime in the 1967 war.