Beit Iba, Tue 23.10.07, Morning
07:15-08:45
The traffic, both pedestrian and vehicular, is relatively sparse today. When we arrived everybody was checked, including women, but soon only men were checked, and no lines formed. A man was sent into the enclosure. One of the soldiers demanded that we refrain from talking to him, we lingered there anyway, and another soldier approached us and explained that he is a cab driver who crossed the line (literally and metaphorically). Of course. The drivers, who often cross this virtual line trying to catch a passenger, have long been the enemy of the people here. They are detained in the enclosure, and released after a short while.
The vehicle line moves fast.
Today we meet again the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme volunteers, the Swiss man, the young black woman from South Africa, and a young woman from Sweden. The Swedish woman put her finger quite fast on one of the main problems of the checkpoint system: its arbitrariness. She knows very well what is its rationale:
creating a subdued, weak population.
Beit Iba
See all reports for this place-
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.
Jun-4-2014Beit-Iba checkpoint 22.04.04
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