Hawara and Beit Iba, Monday 2-2-2004 afternoon Present: Macki, Yarden, Aliah, Judith, Maya (reporting). Summary: Hawara – traffic in two directions flows smoothly. The soldiers act businesslike and courteous. Beit Iba – a difficult checkpoint, long delays for the Palestinians, treatment is arbitrary for those passing. It is important to be there, our presence without doubt speeds up the passage of the Palestinians! In detail : we arrived in Hawara at 13:45. The number of Palestinians waiting to pass is not large; they pass the one after the other. At the north side of the checkpoint (those coming from Nablus) an installation was erected to check for metals, of the sort that is present at Beit Iba, but it is not working – according to the soldiers it beeps all the time and therefore it is useless.The orders the soldiers got are that ages 16 to 35 are detained, the others pass. Also, no permission to pass is given if one does not live at the place of destination. That caused of course many difficult humanitarian cases: a family requested to proceed to Nablus. The wife and her father passed, the husband, who is not registered, as a resident of Nablus and his age is under 35 was forbidden to proceed to Nablus. The woman wept.Or: a family with three children, on their way to Nablus. All of them, except the mother who holds a blue I.D, are permitted to proceed.There were detainees at the checkpoint, and all were released in our presence and were allowed to pass, but it took time because of some communications problems within the army. Beit Iba: we arrived at 15:00. At the west side (those who go towards Nablus) waited some seven-eight vehicles – private and trucks. The passengers complained to us that they had been waiting for one to two hours and nobody is dealing with them. In the line of pedestrians there are some fifty to seventy people. From the east side (those coming from Nablus) a line of thirty people. When we arrived it looked as if none of the soldiers was working. Everything just stood still. We started to talk to the soldiers – some of them known to us from earlier visits (and Macki took a lion’s share, and convinced them in her own way) and suddenly the line started to shorten. The attitude towards the Palestinians at the checkpoint is very harsh. It is not clear why they have to stand there for hours until somebody deigns to spend some time to deal with them. There is a feeling of arbitrariness. It also happens that some people advance together towards the soldier who is examining, and in order to stop them one of the soldiers cocked his gun. And of course all of them in festive clothes, whole families with children.By the way: the apparatus for detecting metal was not in use, which speeded up the passage of people. And again: it is important that we be present at the checkpoint, because our presence absolutely speeded up things, also the Palestinians are happy with us, and of course shower us with requests, that we can for the most part not honor. Qalqiliya: we did not visit there, but Yarden called her contact there, who told her that today the checkpoint was open. On the way back we heard of problems at the Sarra checkpoint, but we could not go there.