Etzion DCL, 13:00:  as has usually happened lately, everyone waiting was admitted and no crowd gathered at the revolving gate.  But at 13:25, when 5 people arrived, there was no soldier at the window and they weren’t admitted.  Our phone call brought the soldier back to his place and he let them in.  Occasionally he disappeared, for about half an hour at a time, and occasionally our phone call brought him back.  That wasn’t the difficult problem we encountered.  The difficult problem involved the Shin Bet.

The Shin Bet had summoned many people to the DCL.  We met a large group who had been waiting since early morning and had not been admitted as of late afternoon.  At 16:30, when we left, not all of them had been admitted yet, and I imagine that some of them didn’t get in at all and were sent home after waiting an entire day.

Here’s what we learned from talking with a father waiting for his son:  The week of March 2 (the exact date isn’t clear), the son sat in a car in the village of Dura.  Soldiers who came to the village ordered him to get out of the car, and their faithful dog immediately bit him severely on the hand.  One of the soldiers fell during the incident.  The father assumes he slipped in the mud.  When he rose, he picked up a rock and crushed the son’s skull.  According to documents from Soroka Hospital that I read, the man began to have convulsions, was given valium, was brought to Soroka and operated on to repair the compression fracture in his skull.  Immediately after he was released from the hospital, on Thursday, March 9, before going home, he was brought to Hebron for interrogation by the Shin Bet.  He left there with a summons to be interrogated by the Shin Bet at Etzion.  The father and son left Dura at 6:30 AM to reach Etzion on time. At 11:00 the son went into the Shin Bet.  The father waited outside.  At 14:00 he turned to us to help him find out where his son is.  I began to make phone calls, and even spoke with the Shin Bet man through the intercom at the door to their office.  He said that the son wasn’t there.  After speaking with the father, he said he’d find out.  At 15:00 someone came out to say he’d seen the son sitting down, and that no one had spoken to him yet.  When the son still hadn’t come out, I went “straight to the top.”  Half an hour after that talk, and as a result, the father was also called in to the Shin Bet.  The son emerged at about 16:30, the father a few minutes later.  They spoke to us when they came out.  We saw the wound in the son’s head, which still had staples.  He said they told him not to look at soldiers, and asked the father who was the woman he’d been speaking to, and told him not to talk to her.  The father wasn’t afraid and warmly shook all our hands before leaving.  Another man emerged after him, whose hands and legs had been cuffed for a long time during his interrogation.  We saw the marks.

Attached are photographs of the head of the man who was operated on, and the hands and legs of the man who had been cuffed.