Irtah, AnabtaThursday morning, 15 December 2005 Observers: Esti, Ruthi (reporting); guest: YonaIrtah – 7:15The place is fairly deserted. According to the drivers, most of the laborers have already passed through. We asked several pedestrians how long they’d been waiting: about a quarter of an hour.In the parking lot, the buses taking family members [from the Territories] to visit prisoners in Israel are filling up. The first bus is headed for the Nitzan prison, escorted by a police vehicle.Anabta – 7:45Very little movement at this checkpoint, that’s staffed by draftee soldiers.A family car pulls up and a very agitated woman gets out and approaches us for help. She speaks Spanish; in the car are her husband and young daughter. The car has some sort of mechanical problem and they want to cross the checkpoint and travel in the direction of Tulkarm to an auto mechanic who’ll fix it, but the soldiers won’t allow them through because she has no document showing she’s a resident of Tulkarm. The woman is an Argentinean married to an Arab and living here 8 years. She tells us it’s dangerous for them to travel further [due to the car’s condition]. The soldiers told her she’d have to stay at the checkpoint and have her husband drive home to bring back her documents to allow her passage. We try to intervene but there’s no one to talk with. The husband’s discouraged, and also angry with his wife that she’s even trying to persuade the soldiers; he turns the car around and they head back in the direction of Nablus.