Gunmen kill seven at a funeral in a Jordanian church, King Abdullah vows an 'iron fist'

Gunmen opened fire on mourners inside a Greek Orthodox church in southern Jordan on Friday, killing at least seven people and wounding 34.

The shooting took place during a funeral in the village of Hamoud, in Karak governorate, about 120 km south of Amman. Survivors said they heard an explosion as the funeral procession began. Masked attackers then forced their way into the church and fired for several minutes.

A man who was at the funeral, Khaled Burqan, told the state broadcaster Al-Mamlaka that dozens of people were in the procession, and that one attacker carried a pistol and the other a rifle. Twenty-seven of the wounded were being treated in hospital on Friday night.

“Never seen something like this”

Obaidullah Al-Maaytah, director of Jordan’s Public Security Directorate, confirmed the toll at a press conference and said the search for the gunmen was continuing. “The perpetrators will be caught and our national unity will not be hit,” he said.

Interior Minister Mazen al-Faraya called it a “terrorist” attack that was “unprecedented”, carried out by a group with “no relationship to humanity”. “Jordanians have never seen something like this before,” he said. He did not name any group, and none had claimed responsibility by late on Friday.

Security forces were deployed around the church and were reported to be pursuing two suspects who had got out of a vehicle and opened fire.

King Abdullah II said on X that the attackers would face the harshest penalties. “We will strike with an iron fist against anyone who overreaches against this country,” he wrote.

Condemnation abroad

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres strongly condemned the killings. His spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, said an attack during a funeral procession was “especially heinous”. The UAE foreign ministry condemned what it called “terrorist and criminal acts”.

A rare attack in a mixed region

Attacks of this kind are extremely rare in Jordan, where Christians number about 300,000 in a population of roughly 11.5 million. Karak has a long history of Christian and Muslim families living side by side.

The town was last hit by militant violence in 2016, when ISIL fighters holed up in its Crusader-era castle killed 10 people, among them security officers and a Canadian tourist, before Jordanian forces killed them.

The attack lands on a country already squeezed by the regional war. Jordan borders the occupied West Bank, where Israel imposed a lockdown on Friday after two soldiers were shot dead near Hebron. King Abdullah, whose family is custodian of Muslim and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem, has long presented Jordan as a haven of interfaith calm. Political analyst Xavier Abu Eid said the attack “goes totally against the message that Jordan wants to give to the world”.