Israeli military says it killed two attackers crossing from Jordan’s Dead Sea area

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DUBAI (Reuters) – The Israeli military said on Friday it had identified what it called “a number of suspects” in Jordan’s border area trying to cross into Israel south of the Dead Sea region and had killed two of them after they opened fire on Israeli forces.

“Two terrorists who crossed a few metres over the border into Israel and opened fire toward the forces were eliminated by two IDF (Israel Defence Forces) reservists in the Home Front Command,” the military said in an updated statement.

“During exchanges of fire with the terrorists, an IDF soldier and an IDF reservist were lightly and moderately injured and were evacuated to a hospital to receive medical treatment.”

The military added that Israeli security forces continued to conduct searches “due to the suspicion of the presence of an additional terrorist in the area”.

A military source with the General Command of the Jordanian Armed Forces said in a statement posted on its website that there was “no truth” in reports that Jordanian soldiers had crossed the western border of Jordan into Israel.

The Jordanian military stressed the necessity of receiving information from official sources and not circulating rumours, the source added.

The latest incident follows a separate attack on Sept. 8 when a gunman from Jordan killed three Israeli civilians at the Allenby Bridge border crossing in the occupied West Bank before security forces shot him dead.

Anti-Israeli sentiment runs high in Jordan, and the Allenby Bridge attack was the first of its kind along the border with Jordan since Oct. 7, 2023, when Palestinian Islamist group Hamas carried out an assault on southern Israel, sparking the war in Gaza that has escalated throughout the region.

Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty in 1994 and have close security ties.

Dozens of trucks cross daily from Jordan, with goods from Jordan and the Gulf that supply both the West Bank and Israeli markets.

(Reporting by Dubai Newsroom and Jonathan Saul in Jerusalem; Editing by Alex Richardson, Shri Navaratnam, Gareth Jones and Sharon Singleton)