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At this point Netanyahu called my father to say, “We have a problem.” He sent his chief of intelligence, Danni Yatom, to explain what had happened and to ask that the Mossad agents be released. Although Yatom did not say so, we later learned that the assassination attempt had been personally approved by Netanyahu. In a déjà vu, a Hamas leader was assassinated in Dubai in January 2010, in what is believed to have been a Mossad operation that involved agents traveling with fake passports. And Netanyahu is again prime minister of Israel.

My father was livid. He had been working night and day to try to advance the cause of peace in the region. The previous January he had played an important role in facilitating the Hebron agreement, whereby Israel agreed to redeploy its soldiers from the city of Hebron in implementation of the Oslo process. A few days before the assassination attempt, he had discreetly passed to the Israelis a proposal from Hamas for a thirty-year cease-fire. And here Netanyahu was trying to assassinate one of Hamas’s leaders on the streets of our capital!

Jordanian doctors struggled to save Meshaal’s life. They were fighting a losing battle, because they could not identify the poison that had been used. My father demanded that the Israelis identify the poison at once and provide its antidote.

Yatom said Meshaal had been injected with a complex chemical compound, and that he would die within twenty-four hours. My father told him that if Meshaal died, he would cancel the peace treaty and break off diplomatic relations with Israel. Finally, after stepping out of the meeting to call Netanyahu, Yatom told my father that there was another member of the Mossad team, a female doctor, staying at the InterContinental Hotel, and she had the antidote with her.

The Jordanian and Palestinian people were outraged at Israel’s brazen act. Even if we managed to save Meshaal’s life, we still had the dilemma of what to do about the two detained Mossad agents and those holed up in the Israeli embassy in Amman. All had entered our country using fake Canadian passports and had been involved in an assassination attempt. They did not have diplomatic immunity, but the Israelis refused to turn over the four accomplices who had sought refuge in the embassy. Jordanian security forces surrounded the embassy to make sure that they did not slip away. At the time, I was commander of Special Operations, and I can say it was a very tense period.

That evening, Meshaal, whose medical condition was rapidly deteriorating, was taken to King Hussein Medical Center and tended to in the Queen Alia Heart Institute, one of the country’s leading medical facilities. The Mossad doctor, who had by then moved to another hotel, was found and brought to the hospital, carrying a vial of the antidote with her. But senior members of Hamas were suspicious and refused to let anyone inject anything further into the sleeping Meshaal without knowing what it was. They demanded the chemical formula for the antidote.

My father called President Clinton, urgently seeking his help. He asked Clinton to demand that America’s close ally undo the damage it had done. Clinton complied, and finally Netanyahu relented and told us that the antidote was naloxone, a drug used to counter the effects of an opiate overdose.

We later learned that the poison was a chemically enhanced version of the painkiller fentanyl, which would kill without a trace in forty-eight hours. It had been hidden in a modified camera that had a long, retractable needle instead of a lens, which one of the assassins had jabbed into Meshaal’s ear. Once they knew the antidote, a team of Jordanian doctors was able to administer it and save his life.

Khaled Meshaal’s life was spared, but relations between Jordan and Israel were in critical condition. My father insisted that the Israelis pay a high political price for their actions, and that they release from jail Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the blind and wheelchair-bound spiritual leader of Hamas, who