Jordanian authorities have arrested a shop owner from the northern city of Irbid after he painted an Israeli flag outside his store for customers to purposely step on upon entering.
The purported idea behind the flag was to express hostility toward the Jewish state in solidarity with the the recent wave of Arab terror attacks against Israelis.
The owner of the shop, Abed al-Fattah Ja'roun, 60, was charged with disrupting relations with a friendly country. He was released on a bail of 3,000 Jordanian dinars ($4,200) with the promise not to repeat the stunt.
According to Ja'roun, security officials and the deputy provincial governor said he had no right to desecrate the Israeli flag because of Jordan's peace treaty with Israel, and that doing so was both an "insult and an injury" to a country considered a "friend."
Despite promising not to repeat the act, Ja'roun vowed to "continue drawing the Israeli flag on the floor of my store as a means to express my outrage at the Zionist attacks perpetrated against the Palestinian people."
According to the London-based Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, numerous other shop owners in the city have copied Ja'roun and begun painting the Israeli flag outside their stores.
Stamping on the Israeli flag is common practice in Jordan, particularly in the framework of expressing solidarity with Palestinians.