Talhouni was Prime Minister from August 1969 to June 1970, during a particularly turbulent time of friction and skirmishes between the Government and thousands of Palestinian guerrillas who were then in Jordan.

At that meeting the King agreed not to enforce restrictions on the Palestinians carrying firearms in Jordanian towns, and the leaders of the guerrillas promised to try to make their followers less unruly.

But as a biographer of the King, Peter Snow, wrote in 1972, "Talhouni wavered; like Hussein, he was not eager to be responsible for the order that could lead to wide-scale bloodshed."

Late in June 1970, the King replaced Talhouni with a new Prime Minister, Abdel Moneim Rifai, a champion of reconciliation with the Palestinians.

The King let the Army crush the fighters, and by the following summer they had been nullified as a military force in Jordan.