On Friday, August 14, 2026, the Royal Hashemite Court in Amman released a statement of the kind that reorders a family in a single sentence, confirming that Princess Iman bint Abdullah II and her husband, Jameel Alexander Thermiotis, had been blessed with twin baby girls. What made the announcement land with a particular jolt was not merely the arrival of two new members of one of the world’s most watched dynasties, but the fact that the family had kept the second heartbeat entirely to itself. When Queen Rania revealed her daughter’s pregnancy in early July, she offered a beach silhouette, a growing bump, and a promise of “a new joy on the way.” She did not mention that the joy would arrive doubled.
The secrecy was its own quiet statement. In an era when royal pregnancies are metabolized in real time across Instagram carousels and comment sections, the choice to withhold the word “twins” until the babies were safely here reads as a deliberate act of protection, a small enclosure of privacy built around a family that operates almost entirely in public view. The court’s language was warm but characteristically restrained, extending congratulations to Princess Iman and Mr. Jameel and to Their Majesties King Abdullah II and Queen Rania on what it called this happy occasion. The names of the two girls have not yet been shared.
For Queen Rania, who at fifty-five has spoken with unguarded delight about becoming a grandmother, the news enlarges a circle she once described, in her own words, as “the grandchildren club.” That club now numbers four granddaughters. Crown Prince Hussein and Princess Rajwa made the King and Queen grandparents for the first time in August 2024, welcoming a daughter they named Iman, after her aunt. The elder Princess Iman and Thermiotis then welcomed their first child, Amina, in February 2025. With the twins, Amina, at one year old, becomes a big sister twice over in a single afternoon.
There is a structural poignancy threaded through the celebration, and it would be dishonest to omit it. Under Jordanian law, specifically the succession provisions that pass the throne through the male line, these four granddaughters stand outside the line of succession entirely. The birth changes the emotional architecture of the family without touching its constitutional one. It is a distinction the Hashemite court has never pretended away, and the affection surrounding these children is offered without reference to it.
Princess Iman, twenty-nine, has always occupied the family’s more private register. The eldest daughter of King Abdullah II and Queen Rania, she was educated at the International Academy in Amman before studying abroad, and she has kept her public appearances largely tethered to family occasions rather than the ceremonial front line. Her 2023 wedding to Thermiotis, held at the family’s private Amman residence, was elegant and comparatively intimate by royal standards, the emotion of the room doing the work that spectacle often does elsewhere.
Thermiotis, thirty-two, is a Greek-Venezuelan businessman who works in finance in New York, the son of businessman Alejandro Thermiotis and the artist María Hernández, known for her work in conceptual photography. His path into the Hashemite family has been notably unshowy, a life built between continents and kept mostly off the record. Crown Prince Hussein, Iman’s older brother, marked the arrival of his nieces on Instagram with a message of gratitude, translated from Arabic, thanking God for the blessing.
What the summer of 2026 has given the Jordanian royal family, then, is not a shift in power but a deepening of tenderness: two girls, unnamed for now, arriving quietly into a house that chose, for once, to keep a secret worth keeping.
