We first drove down to Jaba’a with A. who told us, that the checkpoint there which had been established at 7 a.m. was still active (at 16:00). As usual, the line of cars was endless. Though the 2 soldiers were doing their checking job efficiently (3 minutes per car), people were stuck for an hour in the jam, for lack of more manpower for the checking. To my question about the reason for this prolonged improvised checkpoint, the soldier in charge responded: if we established a regular checkpoint here, the Palestinians would soon find other ways to reach their destination. So we take them by surprise. ,This seems quite in tune with the general policy, never to allow any kind of routine in the Palestinians’ daily life, so as to make them feel insecure At 16:40 the checkpoint was suspended.17:15 – Qalandya: an unusually long line of cars in the South – great confusion all over the place and very tense atmosphere. The soldiers were beyond words – including the volunteer, who was of the worst kind. No checking of pedestrians going North, but when we reached the Northern part, 2 border police stopped a group of 20 men, collected their ID’s (blue mostly, or with a permit), and made them stand aside, while a woman soldier wrote down the information given in the ID’s. The ID’s were returned after 10 minutes, and a new crowd was detained for the same procedure – this time it took about 20 minutes for their ID’s to be returned. Meanwhile our attention was drawn to the car-checking procedure, after a Palestinian woman walked out furiously from her car and demanded to see the officer in charge. We approached the soldiers, and understood from the hysterical screeming of that lady, who had her children in her car , that she had been waiting for 1 1/2 hours, and was ignored and harrassed by the woman soldier in charge. The soldier responded, “so what, if she waited 1 1/2 hours – let her wait. The 2 border police who joined in threatened to arrest me if I continued interfering.Back at the Southern part, the taxi dispatcher told us, he’d just been beaten by a soldier, because of the great mess around the checkpoint.