Irtah (Sha'ar Efrayim)
We arrived at 3:45 and admired the ongoing beautification of the area.
We walked down to the security barrier, and saw hundreds of people waiting for the gates to open. They waited and waited – the turnstiles opened only at 4:01. The crowd flowed into the checkpoint building. At 4:10, though the lines were still full of people waiting to get in, the turnstiles shut down for four minutes – probably because the checkpoint was full. When the flow started up again, we picked people to watch for and walked around to the exit. They got through in 10 – 12 minutes.
At 4:30 we returned to the entrance, and the gates closed for three minutes. This time the people we watched for needed 15 minutes to get through. Around 5:00 it was worse yet – the gates closed for eight minutes, and after they opened the checking process took 20 minutes. We saw young men climbing over the roof to avoid standing in line.
When there is no pressure, checking a person through only takes five minutes. When the process lengthens to four times that – or more, taking into account also the time standing in line to get into the checkpoint – it seems to us that investing in pretty paint and plantings is a bad joke. What is needed is to open up earlier, and add resources to speed up the process.
Irtah (Sha'ar Efrayim)
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The checkpoint is for Palestinians only. It is the main barrier to the passage of workers from the northern West Bank to Israel. Workers with a permit to work in Israel and also for trade (with appropriate permissions), medicine, and visiting prisoners. One can cross the checkpoint only on foot. The checkpoint is located north of Road 557 and south of Tulkarm. Operated by a civil security company, opening hours: between 4:00 and 19:00 on weekdays. As members of Machsom Watch, we began our shifts to this location in 2007. We arrived before it opened at 4 in the morning and report since, on the harsh conditions and the long and crowded queues of workers. The workers who pass by continue their journey by transportation to work throughout Israel. In the first period of its activity, about 3,000 and then 5,000 people passed through this checkpoint every day. Due to the small number of checking points and arbitrary delays for long periods of time in the "rooms", workers feared losing their transportation. Hence workers leave their homes at 2:30 at night to be among the first. Today, 15,000 pass and the transition is faster. Workers are still leaving their homes very early to get past the checkpoint at 7 p.m. In an adjacent compound, there is a terminal for the transfer of goods on a commercial scale, using the back-to-back method.
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