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Jordan Palace says king to receive spine surgery in Germany

April 10, 2022 GMT

FILE - Jordan's King Abdullah II ibn Al-Hussein speaks at a news conference after talks at the Chancellery, in Berlin, Germany, March 15, 2022. Digital-rights researchers have concluded that the mobile phones of four Jordanian human rights activists were hacked over a two-year period with software made by the Israeli spyware company NSO Group. Tuesday, April 5, 2022 findings by Front Line Defenders and Citizen Lab said at least some of the hackings appear to have been carried out by the Jordanian government.(Hannibal Hanschke/Pool via AP, File)

AMMAN, Jordan (AP) — Jordan’s monarch is traveling to Germany Sunday for a spine surgery, Jordan’s palace announced Saturday.

King Abdullah II, 60, will undergo a surgery to treat “a herniated disk in the thoracic spine” at a hospital in Frankfurt next week, and will return home after a recovery period of one week.

The statement from the Arab kingdom’s Royal Hashemite Court said the king suffers from intermittent spine pain “as a result of parachute jumping during his years of service in special operations,” and doctors advised him to receive the surgery as the pain increased recently.

King Abdullah ascended the throne in 1999 after the death of his father, King Hussein.

The western-allied kingdom has been mostly stable in a turbulent Middle East and received hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the civil war in neighboring Syria over the past decade.

Last year, a rift within the royal family went public for the first time after the king put his half-brother under house arrest on charges of attempts to destabilize the country. In March, the palace said that Prince Hamzah has apologized for his role in the rare palace feud and is seeking the king’s forgiveness.