Jordan tells Hamas to find a country which will accept freed prisoner, or she will be sent to US

Jordan has informed Hamas that the movement must find a place to which the Kingdom can deport Ahlam Tamimi, a prisoner freed from Israeli jails, within 24 hours or she will be handed over to the United States. Tamimi stands accused in the US of participation in killing Americans in a bomb attack in the occupied Palestinian territories.

In March 2017, the Jordanian Court of Cassation, the highest judicial authority in Jordan, upheld a decision by the Amman Appeals Court that rejected the extradition of Tamimi to the US, the Palestinian Information Centre has reported.

Al-Araby Al-Jadeed cited unnamed sources as saying that Jordan demanded that Hamas must ensure Tamimi’s removal to a third country. She was freed as part of the 2011 Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange deal with the occupation state.

Sources indicated that Jordan refuses to accept any of the freed prisoners who hold Jordanian nationality as part of the latest ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel. The occupation authorities had released two prisoners holding Jordanian nationality as part of the first phase of the agreement that came into effect on 19 January but the Hashemite Kingdom refused to accept them.

The newspaper mentioned that Tamimi’s family has been demanding that Hamas place their daughter’s case on the negotiation table with the Israeli occupation state, as she holds both Jordanian and Palestinian nationality, not least because there are detainees held by Hamas who carry US and Israeli nationality.

During US President Donald Trump’s first term, his administration considered withholding aid to Jordan, one of its key partners in the Arab world, in an attempt to force it to extradite Tamimi, who was convicted for a 2001 bombing which killed 15 people, including two Americans.

Tamimi is a Palestinian journalist and the first woman to join the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas. She was serving 16 life sentences when she was part of the prisoner exchange in 2011. Born in 1980 in the city of Zarqa, Jordan, she left with her family after finishing high school and returned to Palestine, where she studied media at Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank.

Source » middleeastmonitor.com