“I’m Palestinian-Jordanian,” he said. “I have never been to Palestine, neither me nor my siblings.”

Like the others, Mr. Haddad’s family history is linked to the years of turbulence in the region. His father fled his home in 1948 when Israel was created, became a Jordanian citizen and traveled to Jerusalem, where he met his future wife. The two made a home in Amman.

In 1980, however, his mother returned to Jerusalem to be near her family and to give birth to a son, Muhannad. She had him registered under her Israeli documents and returned home, where her son grew up.

When he turned 16, and was no longer on his mother’s identity card, he went to Israel to have one of his own issued. He said they refused to give him one so he eventually returned to Amman. Then last year, he tried to renew a driver’s license and was told to go to the dreaded office in the Interior Ministry.

Mr. Haddad’s aunt, Hitaf Barakat, confirmed the details of her nephew’s circumstances. “He cannot go back, he cannot work here, he cannot go abroad, yet his mother, his father, his brother all retain their nationality here,” said Ms. Barakat, who works with a United Nations relief agency in Jordan.

The government says that this has nothing to do with demographic balance, that the numbers are too small and that only a fraction of its Palestinian population is subject to this kind of review. It says that the process has been going on since shortly after July 31, 1988, when King Hussein delivered a speech in which he gave up any claim of sovereignty to the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Jordan annexed those lands in 1950 and provided all the residents with Jordanian citizenship. When Israel occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem after the 1967 war, Jordan maintained some administrative control and financial responsibility.

Image Amran al-Tarsha said a government official confiscated all of his Jordanian documents. Credit... Shawn Baldwin for The New York Times

But in 1988, as the first intifada, or uprising, raged, King Hussein announced that the Palestine Liberation Organization would serve as the sole representative of the Palestinian people. He announced that all Palestinians living in Jordan would preserve their Jordanian citizenship while those living in the occupied territories were Palestinian. He did not mention those Palestinians who had moved abroad, including the hundreds of thousands living and working in the Persian Gulf.