Jaume Collboni travels to Jordan after being banned from entry by Israel.

BarcelonaJaume Collboni travels this Sunday to the capital of Jordan after On Friday, Israeli authorities will ban him from entering the country.The mayor of Barcelona will visit the facilities of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and meet with the mayor of Amman, Youssef al-Shawarbeh.

The mayor was scheduled to fly to Tel Aviv this Friday and travel to Ramallah and Bethlehem, where he had been invited by the mayors of Palestinian towns. Although the mayor's request had initially been approved, the Israeli government revoked his travel permit "at the last minute and without any justification," according to the city council.

With this visit to Jordan, Collboni resumes part of the agenda he had planned for his first trip to the Middle East and thus reaffirms his message of support for Palestine. "Far from deterring the municipal government, Israel's refusal to allow the mayor to enter Tel Aviv serves to reinforce the city's commitment to the principles that have historically guided its actions in the field of international relations," the council said in a statement, recalling the Catalan capital's commitment to peace between Israel and Palestine.

Accompanied by Maria Eugenia Gay, the second deputy mayor responsible for the areas of the Presidency, International Relations, Education, Health, Human Rights and Life Cycles, the mayor will meet with Kunal Dhar, the deputy director of UNRWA programs, and with staff from the United Nations facilities. There, they will see how the warehouse from which emergency aid is sent to Gaza works from the inside, how the new camp in Amman is organized, and what role the health program being deployed, funded by Barcelona City Council, plays.

The city council interpreted Israel's veto of the mayor's entry as a "direct attack on freedom and diplomacy between cities." "The decision to prevent access to a delegation that seeks dialogue is a hostile act," the council stated in a statement, which concluded: "The Israeli government seeks to isolate the Palestinian people and hide from the world the constant violations of human rights they suffer."

For their part, Israeli immigration authorities justified the denial of the visa by citing Collboni's alleged participation in a boycott and defamation of the country. In fact, embassy sources pointed out that the city of Barcelona has maintained a "systematic hostile and inciting policy against Israel and its citizens," referring to the plenary decision approved in May 2025 to sever institutional ties with Israel and suspend the friendship agreement with international Palestinians.

Gaza, under bombs and hunger

The mayor of Barcelona's trip coincides with a context of international alarm over the humanitarian situation in Gaza and the virulence of the Israeli military offensive in the enclave's capital. The scale of the carnage is devastating: since October 7, 2023, Israel has killed 62,600 people, equivalent to three-quarters of the inhabitants of the Les Corts district. The number of wounded, 157,673, is equivalent to the entire population of the Sant Martí district. And the number of people suffering from hunger in Gaza (the highest level of malnutrition according to the UN classification) is 514,000, a figure equivalent to 30.5% of Barcelona's population.

This Friday the UN officially confirmed the famine in Gaza City., where nearly a million people are living in subhuman conditions awaiting Netanyahu's troops' capture. While Israel continues to deny the existence of a humanitarian and food crisis, pressure is mounting on Western governments to prevent what the International Criminal Court is prosecuting as genocide.