Jordan said he closed the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and prohibited membership in the Islamist political group.
The prohibition occurred a week after Jordan said that he had arrested 16 members of the Muslim Brotherhood accused of threatening national security by forming activists, exploding and plotting to hit targets in Jordan with rockets and drones.
The Muslim Brotherhood denied any involvement in the alleged plot.
Jordan’s Minister of the Interior, Mazen Farraya, bounded the preying with the alleged conspiracy, saying that group members tried to “pass smuggling and destroy large quantities of documents from his seat” in the same night as the authorities arrested.
Farraya said the Muslim Brotherhood “worked in secret activities and had threatened to undermine stability, security and national unity”.
The Muslim Brotherhood is a political Islamist group founded in Cairo in 1928 which has branches through the Middle East, notably in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine.
The decision of Jordan to ban the Jordanian branch comes after years of regularly tightening the repression against the group.
The group’s political wing, the Islamic Action Front (IAF), won 31 from the 138 parliamentary seats in the elections last September and it is the largest and most popular opposition organization in Jordan.
The group criticized the 1994 Jordanian government’s peace treaty with Israel, which is largely unpopular among citizens, the majority of whom are of Palestinian origin. He also played an active role in demonstrations in Amman, the capital of Jordan, against the War of Israel in Gaza.
Last year, Human Rights Watch criticized the Jordanian authorities for arrested and harassed “dozens of Jordanians” who participated in pro-Palestine or supported online demonstrations.
The Jordan government was frank against the war in Gaza, expeling the Israel’s ambassador and constantly calling for the end of the humanitarian seat on the territory.
The demonstrators called on the government to remove the peace treaty between the two countries, to cancel an unpopular gas agreement and to end all exports to Israel.
The Muslim Brotherhood and its ally in Gaza, Hamas, have experienced an increase in the popularity of the Jordanians since the start of the war. Jordan expelled the leadership of Hamas and closed its offices in 1999, and he considers the group’s growing popularity among its own population with distrust.
The authorities searched the IAF headquarters and branches across the country on Wednesday. A week earlier, the authorities arrested Khaled al-Johani, director of the IAF office.
Wael Sakka, the secretary general of the IAF, told the Guardian that the group’s work would continue despite the ban of the Muslim Brotherhood.
“Our party has no organizational link with another entity and we comply with the provisions of the Constitution, the law of political parties and Jordanian law,” said Sakka.
Farraya said the government was determined to guarantee freedom of expression and political activity in accordance with the law. The country’s cybercrime unit later declared that the publication of anything on social networks concerning the Muslim Brotherhood would have welcomed legal action.
The rights for the defense of rights have warned of regular erosion of civic space in Jordan in recent years, with the demotion of the country of the country of “partially free” to “not free” in 2021 because of its repression against civil society.
The adoption of a new law on cybercrime in 2023 which criminalized discourse on social networks which “undermined national unity” aroused criticism of rights for the defense of rights.
