Two Dead In Shooting Incident At Israeli Embassy In Jordan

AMMAN, July 23 (Reuters) - Two Jordanians were killed and an Israeli was wounded in a shooting incident on Sunday in a building inside the Israeli embassy complex in Jordan’s capital Amman, police said.

The two Jordanians, working for a furniture firm, had entered the embassy compound before the shooting, the police said in a statement.

Israel has imposed a ban on reporting the incident and has made no public comment.

Violence against Israelis is rare in Jordan, a tightly policed country that is also a staunch regional ally of the United States.

But tensions have escalated between the two countries since Israel installed metal detectors at entry points to Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem after two Israeli policemen were shot dead by three Arab-Israeli gunmen on Friday near the site.

The new security measures have triggered the bloodiest spate of Isreli-Palestinian violence for years. Jordan has called for the removal of the metal detectors and thousands of Jordanians have protested against the Israeli move.

In their statement, the Jordanian police said that after the attack they had sealed the heavily protected embassy in an affluent part of the capital and deployed dozens of anti-terrorism gendarmie forces.

Initial checks suggested the two Jordanian men had entered the embassy compound as workmen, they said.

Many of Jordan’s 7 million citizens are of Palestinian origin. They or their parents or grandparents were expelled or fled to Jordan in the fighting that accompanied the creation of Israel in 1948.

Israel has in the past given repeated assurances that it understands Jordan’s concerns and does not seek to alter the status quo in the Muslim holy sites of Jerusalem.

King Abdullah’s Hashemite monarchy has been custodian of the sites since 1924, paying for their upkeep and deriving part of its legitimacy from the role.

(Reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi; Editing by Mark Trevelyan and Gareth Jones)