At Ricardo’s deli, a man asked Shlomit to pay a traffic fine for him. Later, Shlomit wrote that if you meet a Palestinian who needs to pay a police fine, there is actually a relatively simple way to do it. Each report has a barcode, which you can scan and use to pay online with a credit card. Since most Palestinians do not have credit cards, and the post offices in the territories are located within Jewish communities, paying these fines is often difficult for them. At the neighborhood post office where Shlomit went, there wasn’t even a record of the report. This barcode method, she noted, is an easy and practical solution.

Since the DCO has been closed for a period of two weeks, many people arrived once it reopened. At one point, more than twenty people were waiting to go inside. From what we understood, a few of them had been summoned by the Secret Service. People told us that for the previous two hours, no one had been called in to receive a magnetic card—but then, suddenly, a whole group was allowed in. We wondered if our presence had anything to do with that. One man who had been there since 10:00 a.m. finally emerged at 1:50 p.m. with his magnetic card. The soldiers, it seems, needed a long break after the past two weeks.

The women’s restroom is still locked, as it has been for years. The men’s restroom was so filthy we couldn’t even bring ourselves to photograph it.