Nine Dead at a Karak Church, and Within a Day an Old Clip Was Back in Circulation

Gunmen opened fire on St George’s Greek Orthodox church in the village of Hamoud, Karak governorate, during a funeral procession on Friday 23 October. Al Jazeera, citing Reuters that day, reported at least seven killed and quoted survivors describing two masked men who began shooting as dozens attended the procession. The National reported on 24 October that Jordanian authorities raised the toll from seven to nine on the Saturday, that eight of those killed were members of the country’s Christian community, and that it was the largest attack on Jordan’s Christians since the mid-1950s. The Christian Science Monitor reported that Jordan called the shooting a terrorist attack carried out by jihadi militants and moved quickly to protect Christian houses of worship nationwide. One specialist analyst, Rohan Gunaratna, has attributed the attack to Islamic State on his Substack and describes camera footage showing three attackers; Jordanian authorities had not publicly named a group in the first twenty-four hours.

The Brotherhood entered the story through the information layer rather than the investigation. The National recorded that Step News Agency, an anti-Brotherhood YouTube channel that describes itself as specialising in Arab affairs, published an old clip of a television interview with Hamza Mansour, a former head of the Islamic Action Front, in which he refused to condemn ISIS outright. From the Islamist side, the Umma Party said in a statement that the attack in Hamoud “constitutes a dangerous crime and a terrorist action that targets our nation and its cohesion”. The legal backdrop is recent: Jordan banned the Brotherhood in April 2025, accusing the group of complicity in a weapons manufacturing scheme aimed at creating instability, and the United States designated the Jordanian chapter on 13 January 2026, citing its support for Hamas. The Umma Party’s exact relationship to the dissolved IAF is not something we can establish, and it determines how much that condemnation is worth.

Assessment: The technique is the point. No one has alleged Brotherhood involvement in Karak; an archive clip was simply placed next to a fresh atrocity and left to do the work, which is cheaper than an accusation and harder to rebut. Distrust the numbers for now — a toll that moved from seven to nine, day-one survivors describing two gunmen against a later account of three, and a single analyst’s attribution standing in for an official one. Read it alongside Michigan: in Amman as in Caro, the Brotherhood this week functioned less as an organisation under investigation than as an argument available to whoever needed one.