The PA and the Jordanians set up a joint council for the administration of the Temple Mount and the Holy Sites in Jerusalem, as a preparatory step to torpedo the regional peace plan ("The Deal of the Century"), according to Israel Hayom, quoting a study by Orientalist Yoni Ben Menachem, a research fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
Senior officials in the Abbas bureau in Ramallah and the Fatah movement confirmed to Israel Hayom that the cooperation in the matter had been accelerated recently, in anticipation of the publication of the "Deal of the Century" which the Trump administration is working on. A senior PA official told the paper that the establishment of the joint committee manifests a practical step stemming from understandings reached between King Abdullah and Abbas already in August 2017, following the crisis of magnetometers on the Temple Mount.