Beit Iba, יום ד’ 7.5.08, בוקר
The soldiers are new and nervous and tense. On the other hand they worked according to the book and we did not see any hidden laziness. The Palestinians whose number came up in the list are checked by phone with the brigade but are freed within five minutes and this is a new record.
The soldiers make a messenger boy out of the DCO representative. The new order also covers us. When we watch the checking of the trucks the commander orders us into the shed which amuses us. Anyone who has been at the checkpoint in the last days knows that then we had fought to get into the shed. Now we may not come out of it according to the commander.
In the jorra are detainees not truck drivers but people who had been too daring. Every now and again we hear a curse from the jorra. Netta asks the commander naively to free the latest two but he does not answer but wonder of wonders about 5 minutes later the jorra is empty.
The dog trainer unit is doing its work slowly. The drivers are told to take down the tarpaulin and let down the sides so that the dog can get into the new furniture. It takes about half an hour and in that time the driver climbs up and down, takes things apart, reties and screws in what needs to be. To be a truck driver to Nablus you also have to be an athlete. After the truck comes a van and the two passengers stand by hopelessly. The dog trainer tells them to take down the back seat and they have no idea how to do this. And surprisingly cars entering are also checked as carefully and maybe even more so than cars leaving. One of the drivers says " What do they care if I want to blow Nablus up. They should check me when I leave but now we have a new development….the soldiers are looking after us."
Note that we are expected to enter a military order (to have tags, flags of the organization on the cars, to stand in a certain place) shows that the army has a problem putting us into a category which is known to them and together with that there are signs of acceptance that we do exist or legitimacy of our activities. Maybe there should be an article or comic strip about this.
Beit Iba
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A perimeter checkpoint west of the city of Nablus. Operated from 2001 to 2009 as one of the four permanent checkpoints closing on Nablus: Beit Furik and Awarta to the east and Hawara to the south. A pedestrian-only checkpoint, where MachsomWatch volunteers were present daily for several hours in the morning and afternoon to document the thousands of Palestinians waiting for hours in long queues with no shelter in the heat or rain, to leave the district city for anywhere else in the West Bank. From March 2009, as part of the easing of the Palestinian movement in the West Bank, it was abolished, without a trace, and without any adverse change in the security situation.
Neta EfroniJun-4-2014Beit-Iba checkpoint 22.04.04
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