BEIT IBA, Saturday 30 October 2004 AMObservers: Yvonne, Efrat, Adina (reporting)>hr> 08:.15 – There was a very long line of taxis, trucks and ambulances several kilometres before Beit Iba, where there was an unannounced Border Police checkpoint. It delayed us for half-an-hour.08:45 – When we reached the checkpoint, which was extremely crowded, we estimated that several hundred people were waiting to pass through. It was impossible to reach the crossing point itself which was densely crowded, and there was a long line of pedestrians in the area where vehicles usually cross. We were approached for help by four physicians on their way to hospitals in Nablus, a Red Crescent volunteer and a paramedic from a Jerusalem hospital who wanted to enter Nablus and continue on to Jerusalem from there. All had medical permits and passage permits, but had not been allowed to talk to the soldiers. After we had talked to Dalia Bassa , the official who coordinates medical services in the Occupied Territories, the representative of the District Coordinating Office (DCO) [the army section that handles civilian matters; it generally has representatives at the checkpoints ostensibly to alleviate the lot of the Palestinians] came over to let the doctors through. Meanwhile they had succeeded on their own, but we would like to note Dalia Bassa’s helpfulness and the way she often solves problems and briefs us.In the line which had been improvised because of the crowding stood a woman in her ninth month of pregnancy . We called the attention of the soldier to her plight and asked him to let her through quickly, but he laughed and said that she wasn’t pregnant, and if she was, she shouldn’t have come .An angry businessman came over and asked us to observe the absurdity and irrationality of the checking method. The soldiers were simply roaming around and taking ID cards at random, glancing at them and letting people through. The crossing points were crowded, but there were still only three lines. Students [those from Nablus’s an-Najah University have a special arrangement with the army] came over to us and said that it was impossible to go through and that they were turning back. Several hours later we saw several of them returning for a second try.There were more detainees than usual, between 40-50 at any given time. They said they’d been there for hours and while we were there they were released only in a trickle [detainees are, typically, men aged from 16 to 30 or 35 who have no passage permits; recently, young women, too, have been detained. The detainees’ ID details are phoned through to the General Security Services (GSS, also known as the Shabak or the Shin Bet, the Hebrew acronym for the GSS) for checking against a central list of security suspects and the answers are then relayed back to the checkpoints. This cumbersome process can take considerable time, and that can be prolonged even more if the soldiers wait to accumulate a batch of ID cards before passing them on to the GSS , or if they behave in a similarly tardy manner at the end of the process, waiting until they have a batch of GSS clearances before they release individual detainees. Meanwhile, the detainees are virtually prisoners at the checkpoint where the soldiers retain the ID cards until the entire process is completed]. .A 54-year-old diabetic woman, known to us, arrived accompanied by her 27-year-old son in order to enter Nablus for medical treatment. She was allowed through, but the son was sent back. They pleaded with the soldier in the concrete hut who lost patience and eventually grabbed the young man by the shirt and pushed him away. Then another soldier went over to him, took his ID card and sent him to the detainees’ area. Now both mother and son would have to wait for his release. The officer went over to the area and took the only chair for her to sit on. When I complained to him about the soldier’s conduct, he denied it after briefly questioning his men.A married couple with a little girl wanted to enter Nablus to visit family. The woman had forgotten her ID card at home, but she appeared on her husband’s ID card together with the child. The husband was allowed to go through but she had to return home. Similarly, an older couple were refused passage because the wife had forgotten her ID card. The DCO representative understood their dilemma, but “rules are rules”.A student accompanied by his fiancée was detained for “routine” questioning. The soldiers knew him because he goes through every day. He’d been waiting two hours and told us he went through this week with a friend and the friend’s sister. A soldier had made insulting remarks to the friend about his sister, and the student claimed that an officer had witnessed that provocation and had done nothing even when asked why he didn’t intervened. In the end, the friend responded in kind. The student also told us about a 14-year-old boy who’d lost his head because the soldiers had used insulting talk to his sister. He asked us if our officers were not taught how to behave towards people. 10:20 – Four women arrived from the Nablus direction with three small children aged from 18 months to three-years-old. They were from Jasr-a-Zarka and had Israeli ID cards. The 2nd lieutenant refused to believe they’d gone through to Nablus on Thursday and told them they were lying. He took the ID cards and ordered them to stand on one side with the children. We asked if he’d summoned the police and how long it would take for them to come and he shrugged [it is the police, and not the army, who must deal with Israelis in trouble in the Occupied Territories]. When we persisted, he said he’d informed his HQ, and it was now their responsibility. After 20 minutes, when the children were becoming restless, we called the army’s “humanitarian” hotline who took the details and promised to help. The women told us that their close relatives lived in Jenin and Nablus and that they hadn’t seen them for four years. Their brother had recently got married in Nablus and they’d been denied entry permits . They also said that the only way they could visit relatives and bring them money during religious festivals was to risk going through the checkpoint, which they were trying to do now .11:30 – When we left there were 50 detainees and the police had not yet arrived to deal with the women,