A man told us how the army had arrived at night to arrest his son and, not finding him at  home, told his mother to phone him. When he did not answer, they took his wife who is in her sixties in his place. They put her into the jeep, and she could hear another Palestinian who was also there beaten.    They took her to the area of Beit Awa, blindfolded and handcuffed, not knowing where she was and at two o’clock that night phoned her son from her phone and told him to come and fetch her.  She had no idea where she was. Unfortunately, we did not ask what then happened.

The road leading into the DCO has been tarred but evidently there was not enough money to tar as far as the waiting room.

Again we hear stories of how people who languish in Israeli jails lose weight. One man said that his son had been in jail twice, and his weight had dropped from 80 kilo to 50. He now has a problem with his digestive processes and is being treated in Hebron. Having written that, I saw this report of the Public Defender’s office, about Palestinian inmates suffering ‘severe hunger’ in Israeli jails

As the prison population has swelled beyond capacity, the Public Defender’s Office says most detainees are held in tiny, unsanitary cells; guards are said to often beat security prisoners.

We met a couple from Mexico. The woman needed to use the toilet but , of course, the women’s toilet was locked as it has been for years. She went into the men’s toilet.  We did not need Spanish to  understand the word “horrible” and we explained to her that this was how Palestinians are treated here. They were visiting  in Bethlehem and she had come to try for a permit to enter Israel for Xmas

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