Israel planning hospital for Jordanian patients in joint cross-border industrial zone

Israel is advancing a plan to develop a hospital on its territory to treat Jordanian patients as part of a joint Israeli-Jordanian industrial park along the border of the two countries, the Emek HaMaayanot regional council head revealed to The Times of Israel on Wednesday.

The industrial park, dubbed the “Jordan Gateway,” will enable Israelis and Jordanians to cross the border to work on joint projects. An existing bridge, the Jordan River Crossing, located near the Israeli city of Beit She’an, already connects the two sides of the proposed Jordan Gateway Zone.

Itamar Matiash, who heads the council that will house the Israeli side of the industrial park, told The Times of Israel on Tuesday that one idea for the hospital was for it to function as “a center for cancer treatment, so that people from Jordan or further away could come and receive treatment.”

The industrial park, he said, would both strengthen Israel’s economy and ease the high unemployment rates in Jordan, which stands at roughly 18 percent, compared to around 3% in Israel.

“The Jordanian side suffers from high unemployment,” Matiash explained, “and Jordanian workers will be able to cross and work on both sides. And Israelis will be able to establish factories on the Jordanian side.”

First proposed during the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace talks and approved by the government in 2022, plans for the industrial zone stalled in recent years due to mutual lawsuits between the state, the contractor building the bridge, and the regional council, according to Matiash. Over the past year, however, the regional council led a mediation process together with the state and the contractor, during which “the disagreements came to an end, and the project is now getting pushed forward,” he said.

In the meantime, Matiash said multiple “low-tech factories” aimed at employing Jordanians already exist across the border, and more are being planned. On the Israeli side, he said, the council is focusing on “high-level projects like medical tourism, the potential hospital, academia, innovation hubs, and so on.”

With development back on track on the Israeli side, Matiash said the Finance Ministry was working to budget a new road into the Israeli zone, in cooperation with the Transportation Ministry and the Regional Cooperation Ministry.

He said that the council overseeing Israel’s portion of the Jordan Gateway project was also hoping to form a “joint management team” with the Israel Land Authority, which is expected to soon begin working on issuing a tender for a developer to build up the Israeli area.

This is necessary, he said, “so we can bring in companies and organizations that fit the area and strengthen the regional economy.”

While the main purpose of the bridge and the side-by-side industrial zones is to promote cooperation between Israel and Jordan, it will also serve an additional purpose as it sits on a key node in the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) — the US-backed vision for a rail and shipping corridor linking India with the Middle East, Israel and Europe.

US representatives, including an official from the office of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, will be in Israel next week to view the site, a US official told The Times of Israel.

Under the IMEC vision, goods from the east would cross into Israel at Jordan Gateway to be loaded onto trains heading for Haifa Port, and then onward to Europe.

“The European Union and the US are very interested in this area and are coming for visits,” Matiash added. “This is basically a commercial zone sitting exactly on the midpoint of this entire corridor.”

Though the cross-border initiative has been long in the making, there is heightened concern over border security in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led invasion of southern Israel that sparked the two-year-long war in Gaza.

The lengthy and porous Jordanian border is not one of Israel’s more dangerous borders, given the decades-long diplomatic ties between Jerusalem and Amman following their peace deal in 1994, but it poses its own unique challenges due to frequent weapon smuggling attempts.

And the border has not always been quiet. In September, a truck driver entering Israel from the Jordanian side to deliver aid to Gaza killed two soldiers at the Allenby Crossing in the West Bank. Before that, in September 2024, three Israeli men were killed in a terrorist shooting, also carried out by a Jordanian truck driver.

To ensure that the Jordan Gateway initiative remains a safe one, Matiash said the council was waiting “for the state to finalize the security and safety arrangements with the security bodies.”

He stressed that the industrial zone would function as an “ex-territorial bubble,” whereby Israelis may cross into the Jordanian industrial area but not into Jordan proper, and Jordanians may cross into the Israeli commercial/medical side but not enter Israel beyond the zone.

Full entry into Israel would still require the nearby Allenby Crossing, he said.