The Israeli, US and Saudi Arabia governments sought to pressure King Abdullah II of Jordan into accepting the Trump administration's efforts for Middle East peace last year, The Washington Post reported Saturday.
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At least in part due to these efforts, Abdullah lost domestic standing, leading to the alleged plot against the king earlier this year, which resulted in several members of his family, including former crown prince Hamzah bin Al Hussein being arrested, the paper said.
Also arrested for their roles in the alleged plot were Sharif Hassan bin Zaid, a relative of the king and a powerful tribal leader, and Bassem Awadallah, a former Jordanian minister who had become a confidant of the Saudi crown prince.
Citing an American source familiar with the king, the newspaper's columnist David Ignatius wrote that Abdullah felt the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia attempted to sideline Jordan as custodian of Jerusalem's holy sites.
A Jordanian prosecutor referred charges against bin Zaid and Awadallah to the State Security Court on June 2, but the details weren't disclosed publicly. A Jordanian investigative report on the case, shared with Ignatius by a "knowledgeable former Western intelligence official," claimed that the alleged plotters' actions "do not amount to a coup in the legal and political sense, but they were an attempt to threaten Jordan's stability and incite sedition."
The Jordanian report continued: "Awadallah was working to promote the 'deal of the century' and weaken Jordan's position and the King's position on Palestine and the Hashemite Custodianship of Islamic and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem."
The Washington Post report – based on around ten sources from the UK, US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and including intelligence sources – said Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and chief adviser on the negotiations, embraced Netanyahu and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman but grew increasingly antagonistic toward the Jordanian king.
"It became a belief of Trump that the king was a hindrance to the peace process," one former senior CIA official told the Washington Post.
While Trump, Netanyahu and Bin Salman don't appear to have been working to overthrow the king, their actions clearly weakened him and encouraged his enemies, the report said.
Israel controls east Jerusalem, its Old City and the Temple Mount, while Jordan retains a privileged position as custodian of the holy Muslim sites there, a hangover from when it controlled the territory pre-1967.
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According to the Washington Post, Israel's intelligence services – the Mossad and Shin Bet – reached out to the Jordanian government following the exposure of the alleged plot to stress that they were not a part of it.
Ignatius, citing a former US intelligence official familiar with the correspondence, said the Israeli intelligence agencies stressed that "this is not us. It's coming from in front of us," which Ignatius said was understood to mean Netanyahu.
i24NEWS contributed to this report.
