BEIT IBA, Monday 16 August 2004 PMObservers: Riva B., Rivka A., Sivan Tz., Keren R., Yael L., Roni C., Maya K. (reporting)colour=red>Before leaving for our shift we’d received a call from a B’Tselem representative about problems at Beit Iba [B’Tselem is the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories}. He asked us to keep him in the picture. When we arrived there, we heard from Sgt. A., 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], that today Nablus was being held in a “dam” procedure – in other words: people were permitted to enter but not to leave. Since Nablus is the regional centre, and people going in to the town in the morning had not been told of the situation, some of them had been caught inside, unable to return to their homes out of town.The situation at the checkpoint was much better than our colleagues had reported on during the morning. There were 30-40 people waiting behind the revolving doors, which were still locked. Their number grew to about 50 before we left. We did not see anyone passing through, except for a mother and daughter back from Nablus, having bought medication there and been let through by the DCO officers. On arrival we were approached by K., his wife and her sister. Residents of Jenin, they’d gone into Nablus in the morning and been held here at the checkpoint since 11:00. They’d left a 4-month-old baby in the care of an aunt, and the mother was anxious to return to breast-feed her. I called E. from B’Tselem, who promised to speak with the Centre for the Defence of the Individual. We called Ibrahim from Physicians for Human Rights, who told me he’d already approached the Red Cross and Knesset Members and reported on the situation at Beit Iba to them (although not the case of K. and his wife); Ibrahim sounded quite helpless. Later two DCO officers arrived and at 15:50 the family was allowed to proceed.Several minutes after our arrival, a young Palestinian woman was forced into the closed holding cell – the soldiers said she’d sworn at them and spoken rudely . The girl stood there, shouting and banging on the iron door, with her head showing above it. We offered her water. She was released by the DCO officers at 16:00.There were 10 detainees [detainees are, typically, men aged between 16 and 30 who do not have passage permits. Their ID details are relayed by the checkpoint soldiers to the General Security Services (GSS – aka the Shabak or the Shin Bet, the Hebrew acronym) which cross-checks them against a central list of security suspects and then relays the results back to the checkpoint; this process is cumbersome and can be further lengthened if the soldiers wait to accumulate a batch of ID cards before relaying them to the GSS, or if they behave in a similarly tardy manner at the end of the process, before releasing the detainees. Meanwhile the detained Palestinians are virtually held prisoner at the checkpoints since the soldiers hold their ID cards until GSS clearance comes through] . Among them were the following: a taxi driver whom I know from previous shifts here; he persists in crossing the “forbidden line” beyond which the taxis may not be driven ;two people from An-Naqura, who said that they’d been caught in the hills after buying produce from local Beduins; they said they’d already been detained for five or six hours; a young man from Nablus, who’s a student in Russia and was on his way to Jordan in order to fly back to Russia next week; he had various documents and we presented his case to a soldier, R.,– the ice broke as the two talked in Russian… shortly after that, he was released.The soldiers did offer water to the detainees.