Huwwara, Beit Iba, Monday 28 June AMObservers: Mickie S., Hagar K., Sivan T., Anat D. (reporting) colour = red> Beit Iba There was only very sparse traffic through the checkpoint (possibly because of mourning for the casualties caused by the latest Israeli army incursion into Nablus). Trucks proceeded slowly. There were 15 detainees who’d been waiting some four hours. The soldiers had changed shifts shortly before our arrival and the officer in charge said kindly that he’d deal with the matter. We took down the phone number of one of the detainees to verify the time of their release. There was no representative of the District Co-ordinating Office (DCO) [the army section that deals with civilian matters and usually has representatives at the checkpoints , ostensibly to alleviate the lot of the Palestinians] present when we were there, and R.. (the commander of the DCO in Nablus) was not available. We phoned seven different numbers to contact the office and finally managed to speak to the woman operations officer who claimed that she’d try to sort out the situation, but she didn’t sound very convincing. An hour after we left Beit Iba, the detainees were still there.Jit junctionA commando unit jeep was parked at the side of the road, and the soldiers were eating watermelon. There was no-one else there.Huwwara SouthWaiting time at the checkpoint was short and traffic flowed. There was no pressure of people seeking entry. During our stay there the number of detainees began to rise (to about 10). The detainees waited [for security clearance from the General Security Services (GSS)] around two-and-a-half hours. The soldiers and their superior, the commander of the checkpoint, ran things far more effectively than did the GSS – the commander phoned four times to the operations room in order to try to get answers about the detainees and even told them off for their inefficiency. The checkpoint soldiers took care to bring water for the detainees, although there was no water container at the site. They also behaved politely towards us.In contrast, the actual checking of those going through the checkpoint was carried out using two completely infuriating methods: The commander insisted on being spoken to in Hebrew only and did everything possible to make life difficult for those crossing through ; and then he subjected the Palestinians to a truly evil form of cross-questioning. Thus a music teacher, who holds a teacher’s diploma, was forced to pass an impromptu “test” on the history of classical music (who was Mozart and what are his important works?!). He let his ‘examinees’ pass in the end (he had no choice – they had the right papers), but only after abusing them shamefully. An ambulance was detained after it was discovered that one of its passengers (a 47-year-old heart surgeon, being brought to Nablus) was an Arab, and a German citizen, who only had his German passport with him. The ambulance continued on its way with the other members of the crew, but the doctor was released only after the intervention of A., from the DCO, who was at the northern checkpoint.There were two cases in which our pleas didn’t help: a Nablus resident and his son, a student at university in the Ukraine now home for the vacation, approached the checkpoint in order to enter Nablus. But in the son’s ID card, he was listed as living elsewhere (in Beituniya) and therefore was not allowed to pass. After discussions with the soldiers, the father entered Nablus, but the son had to retrace his footsteps to wherever he’d come from. An Israeli Arab woman, accompanied by her sister’s children (the sister had died only yesterday), asked permission to enter Nablus with the children so that she could bid farewell to their mother for the last time. They were all profoundly upset and the two girls, aged 15 and 16, wept without let-up. They were also carrying a lot of luggage which only added to their problems. Here again we had a vivid and awful example of the soldiers’ total lack of compassion and any sense of humanity – army orders came first and foremost, above all els . The woman returned to her home and the poor girls went back to Nablus without her.Huwwara NorthA short while after the soldier’s changed shifts, the woman soldier checking the women said she wanted to stop for a while. She sat down under one of the concrete blocks and did not look at all well. We offered her some water, she said that she was anaemic. When I got back to her after getting some sweetened drink for her she had fainted and didn’t respond when I tried to get her to drink or when we poured a bottle of cold water over her. The soldiers paid no attention to any of this, and ,when we asked that she be moved somewhere more shaded ,they were in no hurry to help, apparently believing she was simply putting on an act. Only after Mickie raised her voice, did the commander call a jeep to evacuate her. What would have happened had we not been there?Apart from this episode , which reduced the number of soldiers checking and slowed the pace at which the Palestinians went through, the soldiers were efficient and courteous. The detainees were released after two hours, and the polite DCO representative helped out in special cases (like that of the ambulance) or detainees at the checkpoint.A [ Jewish Israeli] settler who stopped at the checkpoint unloaded two bottles of ice-cold water for the soldiers and spat out in our direction: “They smell like Arab women”. We didn’t react.