Jordan has five land neighbours: Saudi Arabia to the south and east, Iraq to the north-east, Syria to the north, Israel to the west, and the West Bank (Palestine) to the west. Together these frontiers run to about 1,635 km on Wikipedia’s list of land borders: Saudi Arabia accounts for 744 km, Syria 375 km, Israel 238 km, Iraq 181 km and the West Bank 97 km. Jordan is otherwise landlocked except for a 26 km shoreline on the Gulf of Aqaba, where its sea neighbours are Israel, Saudi Arabia and, across the water, Egypt. Most of these lines were drawn between 1920 and 1932 by Britain, France and Ibn Saud, then adjusted by later treaties in 1965, 1984, 1994 and 2005.
Only in the west and north-west do the borders follow strong natural features. The Yarmouk River, the Jordan River, the Dead Sea and the Wadi Araba depression trace the Jordan Rift Valley, while the eastern and southern borders are a series of straight lines ruled across the Syrian Desert. That contrast explains much about how each border is used: the rift valley lines carry water disputes and peace treaties, the desert lines carry lorries, pipelines and refugees.
Saudi Arabia: 744 km from the Gulf of Aqaba to the Iraqi tripoint
The Saudi border is Jordan’s longest by a wide margin. It begins on the shore of the Gulf of Aqaba south of the city of Aqaba and runs as nine straight segments north-eastwards across gravel desert to the tripoint with Iraq. The dedicated Wikipedia article measures it at 731 km; the land-border list gives 744 km.
Its shape is the product of a long contest over the old Ottoman province of Syria and the Hejaz. After Ibn Saud conquered the Hejaz in 1924–25, the Ma’an–Aqaba region was announced as part of Abdullah’s Transjordan, and in 1925 Britain and Ibn Saud signed the Treaty of Hadda, which fixed a six-line boundary and left Transjordan a short outlet on the Gulf of Aqaba. The 1927 Treaty of Jeddah confirmed it. A sharp concave kink in the northern section is nicknamed “Winston’s Hiccup”, after a story that Winston Churchill drew it after a long lunch in 1921; the historian Warren Dockter traces that tale to a misquoted 1936 Churchill speech, so it is best treated as a myth.
The present alignment dates from a treaty of 9 August 1965. In that swap Jordan received about 6,000 km² of interior desert and roughly 18–19 km of extra coastline on the Gulf of Aqaba, and ceded about 7,000 km² of landlocked territory to Saudi Arabia. The extra coast gave Aqaba room to grow into Jordan’s only seaport.
There are three official crossings: Umari in the east, Mudawwara in the far south, and Durra on the coast. Durra was set up in 1966, became a full immigration centre in 1988, and sits about 30 km from both Aqaba and the Saudi town of Haql. Mudawwara, Jordan’s most southerly settlement (691 people in the 2015 census), grew up as a stop on the Syrian Hajj route and later on the Hejaz Railway.
Syria: the Yarmouk River and the Nasib–Jaber highway
The Syrian border runs about 362–375 km (sources differ) from the Yarmouk valley in the west to the Iraqi tripoint in the east. Its western end is complicated: the river first separates Jordan from the Golan Heights, which Israel has occupied since 1967 and which Syria claims, so the exact tripoint is uncertain. The de jure tripoint lies just east of the Israeli locality of Sha’ar HaGolan, while the de facto one is where the border meets the UN-monitored UNDOF zone.
East of Al-Turrah the line leaves the Yarmouk and zig-zags south-east between the Jordanian town of Ar-Ramtha and the Syrian city of Daraa, then turns north-east and runs straight across the Syrian Desert. Britain and France drew it in the Paulet–Newcombe agreements of 1920–23, refined it on 31 October 1931, and settled the last open questions in February 2005, when the two interior ministers signed a land-swap agreement ending more than 30 years of disagreement over the exact demarcation. It resolved what was then Jordan’s last remaining territorial dispute.
Two crossings serve the frontier: Daraa–Ramtha and the much busier Nasib–Jaber crossing on the Amman–Damascus highway, the main route for Syrian exports to Jordan and the Gulf. Nasib fell to rebel forces in 2015, was retaken by the Syrian army in July 2018 and reopened on 15 October 2018, closed again during the pandemic, and was shut by Jordan on 6 December 2024 as opposition forces seized it. A renovation completed on 25 March 2026 raised its daily capacity from about 10,000 to about 40,000 travellers.
The far eastern stretch is remote and tense. At Rukban, near the Iraqi tripoint, thousands of Syrians fleeing the civil war were stopped on the Syrian side from 2014, forming the Rukban camp; after a 2016 car bombing killed six Jordanian soldiers, Jordan declared its northern and eastern borders closed military zones. On 28 January 2024 a drone launched by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq struck Tower 22, a small US outpost at Rukban, killing three American soldiers and injuring dozens more.
Israel: 238 km along the Jordan, the Dead Sea and Wadi Araba
Jordan’s frontier with Israel follows the floor of the Jordan Rift Valley. From the Yarmouk confluence it runs down the Jordan River, crosses the Dead Sea, whose surface lay about 440 m below sea level in 2025, and continues through the dry Wadi Araba (the Arava) to the Gulf of Aqaba between Aqaba and Eilat. Jordan’s lowest point is the Dead Sea shore, and its highest, Jabal Umm al Dami at 1,854 m, lies in the far south near the Saudi border.
The line was first set out in a British memorandum of September 1922 defining Transjordan, but it only became an agreed international border with the Israel–Jordan peace treaty signed in the Arava on 26 October 1994. The treaty named the Jordan and Yarmouk rivers, the Dead Sea, Wadi Araba and the Gulf of Aqaba as the boundary. Israel recognised Jordanian sovereignty over two farming enclaves, Naharayim/Baqura and Tzofar/Al-Ghamr, which Israel continued to use under a lease that Jordan could decline to renew after 25 years; Jordan gave notice in October 2018 that it would not renew the lease. A water annex committed Israel to supply Jordan with 50 million cubic metres a year and gave Jordan 75% of the Yarmouk’s water.
Two crossings handle travellers directly between the two countries. The Wadi Araba Crossing (the Yitzhak Rabin Crossing on the Israeli side) opened on 8 August 1994 between Aqaba and Eilat and handled 465,059 people in 2010. The Jordan River Crossing, also called the Sheikh Hussein Bridge, opened in November 1994 between Irbid and Beit She’an and is the northernmost link.
The West Bank: 97 km and the King Hussein Bridge
Between the Israeli sector in the north and the Dead Sea, Jordan faces the West Bank, territory Jordan held from 1948 and annexed in 1950, and which Israel has occupied since the 1967 war. In July 1988 Jordan renounced its claim in favour of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The 1994 treaty treats this 97 km stretch differently from the rest of the river: it is labelled an “administrative boundary” with the territory that came under Israeli military control in 1967, explicitly “without prejudice to the status of the territory”. Israel operates the terminal on the western side of the river.
The only official crossing is the Allenby Bridge, called the King Hussein Bridge in Jordan and the Al-Karameh Bridge by many Palestinians, near Jericho. At about 381 m below sea level it is described as the lowest fixed water crossing in the world, and it is the sole land exit abroad for West Bank Palestinians. The river and the shrinking Dead Sea themselves are covered in our guides to the Jordan River and the geography of the Dead Sea.
Iraq: 179–181 km of desert and the Karameh–Turaibil crossing
Jordan’s shortest border with a sovereign state crosses open desert between the Syrian and Saudi tripoints. It runs as six straight lines, a shape that dates from a 1984 revision of the single straight line agreed by an exchange of notes between Britain and King Abdullah in 1932. The 1984 changes made sure that Iraq’s Ruwayshid air base sat clearly inside Iraq. Its strategic value in the 1920s and 1930s came from the planned Kirkuk–Haifa oil pipeline, which had to cross Transjordan.
There is a single crossing: Karameh on the Jordanian side and Turaibil on the Iraqi side, linking the Jordanian town of Ruwaished with Iraq’s Anbar province. It lies about 320 km from Amman and 575 km from Baghdad, and handled around 800,000 travellers in 2010 according to the Jordanian newspaper Al-Arab Al-Yawm. On 22 June 2014 Islamic State fighters attacked the crossing and clashed with the Iraqi army in an attempt to capture it.
Jordan’s 26 km on the Gulf of Aqaba
Jordan’s window on the sea is the northern tip of the Gulf of Aqaba, an arm of the Red Sea about 160 km long and up to 24 km wide, whose coast is shared by four countries. Taba in Egypt, Eilat in Israel and Aqaba in Jordan sit within sight of one another at the head of the gulf, with Saudi Arabia’s coast running south from the Durra crossing.
Jordan has signed maritime boundary agreements with both of its direct sea neighbours: with Israel on 18 January 1996, two years after the peace treaty, and with Saudi Arabia on 16 December 2007. Egypt faces Jordan across the water rather than along a shared line at the shore. For the wider picture of how these borders fit the Arabian Peninsula, see the countries that border Saudi Arabia, whose own northern frontier is the long desert line described above.