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Floods have killed 12 people in Jordan and forced nearly 4,000 tourists to flee the famed desert city, the ancient city of Petra, emergency services said Saturday.
Research teams criss-crossed the valleys near the historic city of Madaba, looking for a girl who was still missing after Friday's floods, said Civil Defense spokesman Iyad Amru. on state television.
Among those confirmed dead after the torrential rains that swept the southern kingdom, six people were found in the Madaba area, southwest of the capital, Amman.
In the east, three people were killed near Dabaa on the desert road, one of the three main arteries north-south of Jordan, while another was killed near Maan , in the south.
It was not immediately clear where the other two died.
Amru said that two girls had disappeared in the Madaba area after announcing that one of their bodies had been found.
Government spokeswoman Jumana Ghneimat said the authorities had found four Israeli tourists missing in the Wadi Rum desert in southern Jordan alive, but were looking for two more.
"Our embassy in Tel Aviv contacted the Israeli Foreign Ministry to obtain information on the identity of the missing Israelis," Ghneimat said in statements issued by the state-run Petra News Agency.
Israel initially confirmed the report, but a foreign ministry spokesman later said that "all Israelis in Jordan have contacted us and all have been found."
– The evacuated tourists –
The Jordanian army has deployed helicopters and all-terrain vehicles to help with search and rescue operations after the flood waters cut the desert highway back and forth.
A rescuer was also among the dead, said the spokesman of the civil defense.
State television reported that the waters had reached up to four meters in parts of the city of Petra, ravine with red rocks, and in the adjacent desert of Wadi Musa.
She has broadcasted images of tourists sheltering on the heights on both sides of the road to access Jordan's biggest attraction.
The government spokeswoman said 3,762 tourists had been evacuated.
Recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985, Petra annually attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists to its treasure, temples and mausoleums carved in the rock.
His buildings have been used as sets for several Hollywood blockbusters, including "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade".
Wadi Rum, also a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has attracted generations of tourists with its spectacular rock formations of sandstone and granite.
His landscapes served as a backdrop for the filming of the Hollywood classic "Lawrence of Arabia".
The latest deaths come after the October 25th sudden floods in the Kingdom's Dead Sea region, which killed 21 people, most of them children on school trips.
The Jordanian ministers of education and tourism both resigned last week for failing in the government's response to these floods.
The Ministry of Education ordered the closure of schools Saturday throughout the country, despite warnings of torrential rains.
Jordan's Minister of Water and Irrigation, Raed Abu al-Saud, said on Saturday that the country's 14 major dams had filled about 26 percent of their total capacity in the last 48 hours because of heavy rains.
Jordan is a water-scarce country with 90% desert.
