Ar-Ram, 05.05. p.m.Observers: Edna K., Lia N. (reporting)We arrived at Ar-Ram earlier than usual. On our way, we already saw that they were looking for Palestinians returning from Jerusalem who don’t have the proper permit to be there. Therefore, the soldiers set up their usual flying checkpoints and started to take people off transits, buses, and private cars. There were old people, a schoolgirl of 16, a mother with a sick child and so forth. The border police commander of the checkpoint ran things as if she was director of the chief of staff’s dungeon which did not stop her from fooling around with the other border police – including a group of friends from her unit who came to visit the checkpoint. The treatment of the Palestinians was slow, and impersonal. The forms that they fill out was done very, very slowly. The commander of the checkpoint took care of this herself. And because every telephone call, every word, everything taking place in the area was of interest to her, whether in her capacity as the commander or on a personal level, everything was carried out in slow motion. We must say that when we directed her attention to a mother with a sick child, she got rid of them very quickly with a mild reprimand and didn’t bother filling out a form. Others did not have that kind of luck, and matters just dragged on while all the time they were bringing in new “captives”, so that there was a substantial number of people there.A 16-year old girl, resident of Kfar Akeb was allowed to be in Jerusalem, but because she was concerned that her papers were somewhat complicated (there was a matter of family reunification), she produced the permit of her friend and thus became an impersonator and her case was dealt with differently. Her father came and tried to speak with the police, but they didn’t even want him to approach the checkpoint so as not to speak with his daughter. The girl stood without moving, without drinking, without speaking, without looking at anyone. For more than two and a half hours, until we convinced her to sit, she looked as if she was going to collapse at any moment. A mother who had to hurry to collect her children from kindergarten got the very slow treatment and our efforts did not help to speed up dealing with her papers. We have already witnessed how these forms are dealt with but we never came across anything so slow – a kind of determination to deal with all of them together, that is, as more people joined the group, the chances of the first ones to be released grew less.Telephone calls to Fares and Tzidki apparently led to the operations officer (or the assistant operations officer) of the unit to come and from that moment, people were quickly released, and first of all, the mother who was hurrying to the kindergarden. The young girl received a reprimand and a man clarified to her which papers would help her straighten things out so that things would go more smoothly in the future and advised her father accordingly. The whole story took three and a half hours and then we had to return to Tel Aviv without going to Qalandiya.