Abu Dis areaSun. 10 October 2004 AMObservers: Dalia R. and Ilana D. (reporting)Two guestsAbu Dis: At Augusta Victoria, we collected our two Ecumenical guests (Katya from Denmark and Hanna from the UK) and drove to the pishpash gate from the north. There were no Border Police and people were crossing freely in both directions. We continued, because last week we heard in Qalandiya that the peak period is before we arrive, because they hadn’t yet moved the clock back in Jordan, and schools start at 07:00, Israel time. So after we crossed via the petrol station and the Cliff Hotel – with a sleepy Border Policeman – we drove towards the Mount of Olives. We encountered a Border Police jeep and six detainees, caught a few minutes before. We told them to phone the Centre for Defence of the Individual in the event they wouldn’t be freed within three hours.Sho’afat: At 06:00 we reached the northern exit of Sho’afat refugee camp and saw two border policemen. We’d been told to use this route to get to Jerusalem. At the checkpoint, cars and pedestrians were crossing unhindered. to crawl through the barbed –wire, but were sent back by soldiers. Yuval from the Humanitarian Centre said he couldn’t help in this case.We hoped to get to the Mishor Adumim checkpoint before 09:00 but got stuck in an immense vast traffic snarl-up (with lots of settlers too) ahead of the entrance to Pisgat Ze’ev. We reached the checkpoint at 09:15, just in time. We counted 19 yellow cabs waiting in a line, and three detained cabs that had just got their papers back. The border policeman drove off in a jeep, with all the yellow cabs driving in its wake, taking the students en route to Abu Dis university.The checkpoint at the exit from Al-Ezariya had already been dismantled, and all the traffic was flowing well. We drove via the transit-vans to Sawahre. There we found a friend of our guests – Eric, from Sweden – who lives nearby and visits the checkpoint almost every day. There were no car lines on either side, but a bus had already been detained at 07:45, according to Eric, and ten Palestinians were waiting in the shade for their papers to be returned. As we got close to the checkpoint, some soldiers (including two woman soldiers) were having lunch and joking around, but two of them organized the papers of most passengers on the bus, which was sent on its way at 10:00. We waited until 11:00. and meanwhile only five of the ten detainees had been released. We phoned the Humanitarian Centre and the Centre for the Defence of the Individual, but both of them told us they were already handling the matter, at Eric’s request.We went back on the highway connecting Kedar and Ma’ale Adumim. At the Az-Za’ayyem checkpoint, we saw a detained truck and six Palestinians standing in the sun at the side. At 11:45, we dropped our guests off at Augusta Victoria.