On October 23, 2026, three local Jordanian gunmen drove to St. George’s Greek Orthodox Church in the village of Hamoud, in Karak Governorate, where mourners had gathered for a funeral. They opened fire from outside the church and continued shooting as people tried to escape. Nine people were killed and 34 were wounded. Three days later, Jordanian security forces found the suspects hiding in an abandoned house nearby. After a prolonged exchange of gunfire, all three were captured with serious injuries.
Jordan identified them as Jordanians, members of the same local family, and Jordan’s Public Security Directorate said they adhered to an extremist takfiri ideology. Officials initially said there was no evidence that the attackers belonged to an outside organization, but Jordan’s subsequent airstrikes on alleged militant targets in southern Syria, which Amman linked to the Karak attack, suggested authorities were investigating a broader cross-border network.
Christians are being murdered for their faith by Muslim so regularly that another nine bodies in another Middle Eastern church can disappear into the statistics. In Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Mozambique, across the Sahel, and elsewhere, Christian communities have been bombed, burned out of their villages, kidnapped, enslaved, and driven from lands where some had lived for centuries before Islam even existed. So what are nine more dead Christians in Karak?
On the surface, this attack is just another day in the long retreat of Christianity across the Islamic world. But looking at this attack in particular this way would be a mistake.
What happened in Karak should set off alarm bells far beyond the Christians who were murdered there. It should alarm Jordan, every country in the region, especially Israel, and, ultimately, the wider world.