Abu Dis Thursday 5 May 2005 PMObservers: Dvorah G, & Drora P. (reporting) 15:00 – 17:40 – We walked up to the Cliff Hotel. A jeep was parked outside and we saw soldiers inside the hotel. We didn’t meet any pedestrians and everything seemed dormant and mournful. We drove towards the settlement to have a look at the place and to turn the car around, and then we saw a woman with a child following us. She had just been with the child at the doctor. As we stopped to offer them a ride, a car drove up (it was her brother-in-law) he had come to take them home. He invited us to their home, and we accepted.The testimonies and the story are exactly as related by our host, as well as evidence we saw with our own eyes.Before the wall was built, the extended Surhi family lived in a neighbourhood which belongs in municipal terms to Jabel Mukaber. All its citizens were, and remain, Israeli citizens. Then came the wall. Seventeen families were left on the Israeli side of the wall, and the rest on the other side. Their electricity and water were cut off, so the residents connected their homes up in all sorts of improvised methods. The schools and kindergartens are now on the other side of the wall and alternative facilities are a long way away. Our host solved that by registering his daughters with private kindergartens. There are no clinics, no public transport. The residents continue paying municipal taxes, and the situation is unbelievable and intolerable. The saddest thing was that he is willing to give up everything, if only there was a proper playground where the children could play in the afternoon. However, the residents have organised as a committee and there is a chairman who’s working on these issues. He noted the tremendous help given by Rabbi Ackerman of the Rabbis for Human Rights organisation and by the Civil Rights Association. So far, there have been no results. I put Mr. Surhi in touch with Mr. Pepe Alalo, the representative of Yachad on the city council, and perhaps he’ll be able to do something. On our way to Sawahre, we drove on the apartheid road, which has been paved up to Kedar. For the first time, we saw a private car, with a white licence-plate, and a truck driving in the opposite direction on this road. When we were more than halfway to the main checkpoint, we saw ahead of us a large checkpoint (two constructed pillars with a metal bar blocking passage). The bar was secured with a lock and chain and couldn’t be moved. We had no idea how those cars had actually got through, where they had come from, and who locked the checkpoint before we arrived.