Tarqumiya – morning – Thursday 5.2.04 Watchers: Rachel N., Michal Z., Hagit B. After a short chat with the border policeman at the checkpoint (in the form of, what are you doing here? Aren’t you afraid? Closed military zone etc.) we moved on to the Palestinian side of the checkpoint. It was drizzling with rain. There was a small shelter on the site. A thin trickle of workers and traders came into Israel. Only those with a permit for agricultural work were permitted to enter. Those with permits for work in the building trade or the services were forbidden to enter.After checking on previous occasions, we now know that since the terror attack on the Geha highway, there has been a sweeping order not to let in workers from the building trade and the services. Also those workers with a magnetic card. The problem is that the order is not always enforced and sometimes they do let them in, so they always come back and try again. Israeli employers continue to send the taxis. There are routes which bypass the checkpoint and sometimes workers pass through and then endanger themselves by being illegal entrants, the price for which is the denial of their entry permits if they are caught. Another reason that they do not bypass the checkpoint is the price of the taxi ride to work, which is more than NIS 100. We learned all these details from the workers that had been held back. Every work day is important for all of them at this time because of all their expenses from the holiday. The payment they receive is payment per working day. Israeli employers collect from them between NIS 600 and NIS 800 per month in advance for the work permit application. If they do not work (due to closure, delays) they lose a lot of money for which they are not reimbursed.All the workers we spoke to have entry permits for three months, from December 23, 2003 to March 23, 2004. They have not worked for a month and so they will lose a great deal of money – not just the daily wage – but also the money paid in advance to the employers.The workers did not want to give us the telephone numbers of their employers so that maybe we could bring them the money, for fear that the employers would no longer apply for work permits for them. This is really a Catch 22 situation. Another problem was that of a worker whose wife is Jordanian and has been denied an application to receive a Palestinian identity card. She is the mother of 5 children, the youngest of which is 13 months. She has not seen her parents for 10 years and she cannot go and visit them for fear that they will not let her return – we referred him to the Moked – Center for the Defence of the Individual.Something else which is also irritating in my opinion is that cars with yellow license plates pass the checkpoint. Holders of blue identity cards pass after the documents have been checked, while the Palestinians who are sitting waiting are sent back to the line of those awaiting entry and only then are their documents checked. Why? They cannot check the documents at the same time? Why must they hassle them by making them wait 50 meters back? We did not get an answer to these questions from the border policemen. At 7:30 we said goodbye to the Palestinians (they went home in the taxi). The soldiers at the checkpoint were OK and it seemed that they are only carrying out their orders. When we told them about the problem of the workers’ money they were surprised to hear this and said “what!!??” Maybe now they can understand what we are doing at the checkpoint. The rain stopped and we saw a beautiful rainbow.Will there be an end to the occupation?