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Jordan's King Heads to Europe to Garner Support to End Gaza Conflict

FILE PHOTO: Jordan's King Abdullah II addresses the 78th Session of the UN General Assembly in New York City, US, September 19, 2023. REUTERS/Mike Segar/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Jordan's King Abdullah II addresses the 78th Session of the UN General Assembly in New York City, US, September 19, 2023. REUTERS/Mike Segar/File Photo
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Jordan's King Heads to Europe to Garner Support to End Gaza Conflict

FILE PHOTO: Jordan's King Abdullah II addresses the 78th Session of the UN General Assembly in New York City, US, September 19, 2023. REUTERS/Mike Segar/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Jordan's King Abdullah II addresses the 78th Session of the UN General Assembly in New York City, US, September 19, 2023. REUTERS/Mike Segar/File Photo

Jordan's King Abdullah leaves on Saturday for a European tour to garner support from the region's leaders for an end to the Israeli "war on Gaza", Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi told state media.

The monarch, who met US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday, has had intensive contacts with leaders in the region and in the West to de-escalate the violence and prevent the region being dragged into a wider war, officials say.

Jordan on Saturday said any move by Israel to impose a new displacement of Palestinians would push the region to the "abyss" of a wider regional conflict.

Safadi also said Israel's blocking of humanitarian aid to Gaza and forcing its residents to leave their homes as it escalates its military action were a "flagrant" breach of international law.

Israel had given the entire population of the north of the Gaza Strip a Saturday morning deadline to move south ahead of an expected ground offensive to root out Hamas militants. It has said it will keep two roads open until 4:00 pm. to allow people to escape.

Safadi said the military campaign against Hamas was killing innocent civilians and would bring despair and destruction in its wake that would not bring security to Israel.

"The war is killing and displacing innocent Palestinians and will leave the region and the world facing the repercussion of an environment of destruction and despair that Israel will create in Gaza," Safadi said in comments after meeting his Canadian counterpart.

"It won't achieve security or lead to peace," Safadi said, in the toughest language from Jordan since the conflict that broke out after a devastating cross-border attack by Hamas a week ago.

Israel's push to move the entire population to leave their homes was a "red line" that Arabs would confront, Safadi said.

"This will bring the region into the hell of war. We have to end this madness," he added.

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Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
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Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)

Family members of Syrians who disappeared in the 14-year civil war on Sunday gathered in the city of Daraa and called on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them.

The United Nations in 2021 estimated that over 130,000 Syrians were taken away and disappeared, many of them detained by Bashar al-Assad's network of intelligence agencies, as well as by opposition fighters and the extremist ISIS group. Advocacy group The Syrian Campaign says some 112,000 are still missing to this day.

When opposition led by group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham overthrew President Bashar Assad in April, they stormed prisons and released detainees from the ousted government's dungeons.

Families of the missing quickly rushed to the prisons seeking their loved ones. While there were some reunions, rescue services also discovered mass graves around the country and used whatever remains they could retrieve to identify the dead.

Wafa Mustafa held a placard of her father, Ali, who was detained by the Assad government's security forces in 2013. She fled a week later to Germany, fearing she would also be detained, and hasn't heard from him since.

Like many other Syrians who fled the conflict or went into exile for their activism, she often held protests and rallied in European cities. Now, she has returned twice since Assad's ouster, trying to figure out her father's whereabouts.

“I’m trying, feeling both hope and despair, to find any answer on the fate of my father,” she told The Associated Press. “I searched inside the prisons, the morgues, the hospitals, and through the bodies of the martyrs, but I still couldn’t find anything.”

A United Nations-backed commission on Friday urged the government led by interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa to preserve evidence and anything they can document from prisons in the ongoing search for the disappeared and to pursue perpetrators.

Some foreign nationals are missing in Syria as well, notably American journalist Austin Tice, whose mother visited Syria in January and met with al-Sharaa. Tice has not been heard from other than a video released weeks after his disappearance in 2012 that showed him blindfolded and held by armed men.

Syria’s conflict started as one of the popular uprisings of the so-called 2011 Arab Spring, before Assad crushed the largely peaceful protests and a civil war erupted. Half a million people have been killed and more than 5 million left the country as refugees.