AMMAN (Dispatches) – U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has travelled to Jordan to hear demands for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza when he meets Middle East foreign ministers on Saturday, Jordan’s foreign ministry said.
Saudi, Qatari, Emirati, Egyptian and Jordanian foreign ministers as well as Palestinian representatives will stress the “Arab stance calling for an immediate ceasefire, delivering humanitarian aid and ways of ending the dangerous deterioration that threatens the security of the region”, the ministry said in a statement.
In a meeting with Blinken in Amman early on Saturday, Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati stressed the importance of working towards a ceasefire in Gaza and stopping what he described as the Zionist regime’s aggression in southern Lebanon, Mikati’s office said in a statement.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah has been clashing with Zionist troops across the frontier since the occupying regime started its onslaught on Oct. 7.
Blinken, who arrived in Jordan on Friday after earlier meeting Zionist regime officials, said the U.S. was determined that there should not be a second or third front in the conflict.
King Abdullah told German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in a phone call on Friday the international community urgently needed to push for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza to protect civilians, the royal court said.
The king said the occupying regime’s military campaign would not succeed and the only path to permanent peace was revived negotiations on an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.
Jordan is a staunch U.S. ally and shares a border with the West Bank. Concerned about potential for a wider conflict, Amman has boosted border security and asked Washington to deploy Patriot air defence systems.
Some 5,000 Jordanians protested Friday in the capital Amman, calling on King Abdullah to press for a ceasefire in the Zionist war, AFP correspondents said.
Speaking at the demonstration, lawmaker Yanal Fraihat said protesters wanted the king “to stop the aggression against Gaza” by using Jordan’s “peace” agreement with the Zionist regime as leverage.
Waving Jordanian and Palestinian flags, protesters denounced as “shameful” the kingdom’s 1994 peace agreement with the occupying regime, calling it an act of “surrender” that the king should nullify.
The rally outside a mosque near the Zionist regime’s embassy in Amman took place amid a heavy presence of Jordanian security forces, the correspondents said.
Another rally with some 1,500 protesters took place outside a prominent mosque in central Amman, where demonstrators chanted slogans in support of the Palestinian “resistance” and against Arab “normalization” with the occupying regime.