HUWWARA SOUTH, Thursday 28 November 2004 PM Observers: Shuvit M., Ofra T. (reporting) colour=red>Summary A shift (starting at 14:00 and ending at 17:00) marked by much pressure and dangerous crowding in the turnstiles; a nasty checkpoint commander whose behaviour toward the people under his control actually created the difficult situation, until a backup came from 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]; this DCO representative eased some of the pressure. We arrived as the checkpoint soldiers were changing shifts , alas losing the commander who’d worked earlier , a friendly and attentive soldier who took responsibility even for a young man who said his ID card had been taken by one of the soldiers and lost. He didn’t even remember which one (they, of course, were sure he was lying). A., from the DCO, was ready to help, as usual and suggested that the commander write him a note, and sign it, which would allow him to travel on that day, and to contact him on Sunday to find out if the ID had been found.The building projects at the checkpoint were continuing. The truck/crane/tractor working here approached “easy, easy” towards the ambulance waiting in line.Two women from Jerusalem, with Israeli ID cards, wanted to go through to visit Nablus. Shuvit spoke with the relevant official who showed her the instructions on the fax. She then wrote the letter for them – of course, it had to be in Hebrew, the language of the rulers, and not in the language of the “natives”.At the turnstiles: crowding, danger, shoving and humiliation [these are not simple turnstiles such as one finds in a subway station, but high , revolving gates made of steel bars: each segment is barely large enough to admit one average-sized person; there is virtually no room to spare for anything that person may be carrying , whether a child or a parcel; passage for pregnant women or for the elderly is extremely difficult and frightening] Women and children were packed together all around the narrow turnstiles. The soldiers released and closed them at their pleasure and trapped the women between the short iron bars. And they were frequently caught inside. The soldiers were very busy with the renovations and simply left the women trapped, with all their belongings and with their crying children, without paying them the slightest attention. One of the women caught inside had three children with her.. The children were frightened and crying and she was distraught and humiliated. Our requests to the commander to release her by letting the turnstile move a bit – with a touch of his omnipotent hand on the button – was answered by the words: “You are preventing me from carrying out my job!” He repeated this sentence all the time, with increasing anger. The soldier under his command was told “Don’t speak with her!” The voices of the crying infants and the exhausted and angry women, who were ordered afterwards to take out and show all the clothing they were carrying , supposedly demonstrated the thoroughness with which he was doing his job. He would not allow us to take through the turnstiles those small children who were instead held in their anxious mothers’ arms. A Danish TV crew, here at the checkpoint and making a film on terror, asked me whether I thought the situation at the checkpoints created terror. Perhaps because of telephone calls to the DCO, or perhaps because of the presence of the Danish team, the checkpoint filled up with officers and soldiers from the DCO. The crowding lessened and the atmosphere became more efficient. No, they were not upset by the crowding and the danger the little children faced in the turnstiles, nor by the fact that no detainees had not been released since we arrived. “Another few minutes,” they kept saying , brushing us off politely.[Detainees are, typically, men aged from 16 to 30 or 35 who have no passage permits; recently, young women, too, have been detained. The detainees’ ID details are phoned through to the General Security Services (GSS, also known as the Shabak or the Shin Bet, the Hebrew acronym for the GSS) for checking against a central list of security suspects and the answers are then relayed back to the checkpoints. This cumbersome process can take considerable time, and that can be prolonged even more if the soldiers wait to accumulate a batch of ID cards before passing them on to the GSS , or if they behave in a similarly tardy manner at the end of the process, waiting until they have a batch of GSS clearances before they release individual detainees. Meanwhile, the detainees are virtually prisoners at the checkpoint where the soldiers retain the ID cards until the entire process is completed]. It seems that only a real catastrophe will cause the Israel army to remove these turnstile , these dangerous contraptions of control. Only when someone has to explain what happened to an investigating commission (which will be appointed to demonstrate to the world once again how humane we are) will we perhaps see some shift. “It’s only a bunch of babies crying,” said the obedient soldier.