BEIT IBA, Tuesday 24 August 2004 AMObservers: Maya, Ruthie, Iris, Elinoar (reporting)colour=red>It was a hard and depressing shift even though there were no cases of women giving birth, and no one got beaten up. When we arrived we saw immensely long queues of both men & women. The lines were moving painfully slowly, indeed hardly at all, because the soldiers were busy shouting “Irja! Irja!” [Back! Get back!] almost obsessively and urging the people to move back to some “virtual” line.Those in line had no idea what was being demanded of them. The checkpoint commander decided to prove to us that we were wrong – it wasn’t a “virtual” line, but a properly marked point: one of the posts at some distance from the soldiers was painted white. As he lost patience , he stretched a rope across the passage, at eye level, and, when that didn’t fully work, he added a few hastily scrawled signs in Arabic. “So now they’ll get it, will they?” he asked us cynically.Had we told him that this is what is called “humiliation” he probably wouldn’t have understood what we were talking about. A woman suddenly burst into tears just as her turn finally arrived, then and not at any point before……… Two fathers with very young, and very obviously sick, children were denied passage. One was not allowed to accompany his wife because he was only 24-years-old [men between the ages of 16 and 30 or 35 always automatically arouse suspicion among the soldiers and always have a very difficult time moving around the Occupied Territories]; the other man had gone through the checkpoint yesterday. So why then didn’t he have a letter from the doctor? We kept explaining that the child was really sick, it was so obvious. Yesterday he’d been given some medicine (the father had it with him), but it hadn’t worked , the child had a high temperature. Nothing doing. A., the representative of the District Co-ordinating Office (DCO) , a really helpful fellow, couldn’t convince this tough guy either [the DCO is the army section that handles civilian matters and generally has representatives at the checkpoints, ostensibly to alleviate the lot of the Palestinians]. A phone call to Dalia Bassa, the official in charge of health matters in the Occupied Territories, may have speeded things up a bit, or maybe it was our joint efforts. Eventually the father and baby went through.Conclusion: None of the media coverage, nor the intervention of the high command and of political figures are going to help one iota. These young soldiers really and truly believe that by not letting a young father with a sick child past the barrier – into Nablus and not out of the town — they are aiding the security of their homeland. I’m not being cynical, I just despair of it all.