Shaked, Rihan, Monday April 3, 2006, AMObservers: Vivian and Nava Shaked, 08.35The gate has just closed and the children have gone through. The people walking around in the CP are workers from the electric company who are doing some jobs. Rihan, 08.45A soldier at the vehicles gate at the entrance to the CP receives us with: “I don’t want to talk to you; you are for the Arabs and against us. Go to your parking lot with the Arabs.” We said “Shalom” and went on to the parking lot of the Arabs. This was a strange reception, but we are used to all kinds of greetings.Eight people who tried to go through at Kafin, and found the gate locked there, came to try to pass from Rihan to the seam zone. They have agricultural passage permits that are valid for the Kafin Gate. But at Rihan they are invalid. This is a story that recurs here. We called the District Coordination Office and the soldier there asked us to call back; in the meantime he would find out about the matter from his commander. While we waited (35 minutes), some of the soldiers at the CP went off duty and new ones came. So the workers tried their luck a second time. This time, two went through without any problem and the six that remained came back. I phoned the Tul-Karm DCO again; I thought that it had been their initiative to let the pair go through. But the answer I got was that today there is no passage through Kafin, because of terror threats.The whole thing looks like the “Toto” lottery: eight workers try to go through to work on the other side of the fence and are refused passage. On the second attempt, two of them do succeed in going through, and six do not. But those who did make it come back because it turns out that the group of eight is a team that came to work together with the landowner, and without him, they cannot do any work.At 10.30 – we left.