Rihan, Wednesday, June 16, 2005, PMObservers: Revital, Chani (reporting)12:00-14:15We drove through Barta’a, same narrow streets, lively marketplace and traffic jams, and from there we turned onto the new road leading us to the checkpoint. We were looking forward to the new innovations on site which took place since our last visit, a week ago. And there were many, starting from the rather strange signs separating Israeli citizens, Palestinians and the military, settlers of Hermesh and Mevo Dotan. The carousels are not operational at this time, but one can grasp the idea.To our surprise, detainees who were brought into the pen, were released in only a few minutes. A nice, polite soldier told us that now they have computers with software which expedites the inspection process.Pedestrian movement was most sparse, and we therefore went to look at the vehicle inspection post. We wanted to understand why the average waiting time is more than 30minutes while the number of cars in line in not that numerous. From this moment on, we were witness to a new reality of humiliation. During the past year we saw some difficult situations and witnessed some gruesome scenes, but this exceeded them all, and we can’t let it go on: A female soldier with a loudspeaker screams orders in Hebrew, adding a few words in broken Arabic. Drivers are not allowed to get out of the car while waiting for inspection.“Red VW, Ta’al!” (come over!)“The man with the black shirt, get up and fly away from here.”Her over eagerness to use the loudspeaker, led us to expect her to start singing.The peak of that circus of the absurd was the dance that each driver was order to ‘dance’ – The driver is ordered out of his car; at times he can’t hear the soldier because of the sound of the engine. When he finally gets out of the car, he is bombarded with orders:“Roll up your shirt”!“Turn around”!“Open your pants”!The shock on the driver face is obvious, “No way will I take off my pants”!“So roll up from the bottom up, one leg, now the second one – nice, now get back into your car and drive forward”!“Gray Isuzu, Yalla Rooch(Beat it!!) Don’t stand here”!And that is only an excerpt of what was yelled at Palestinians through the loudspeaker continuously.We sat opposite the amazed drivers and were embarrassed to watch. We felt like approaching them and apologizing. Most of the drivers appeared to be familiar with the new process, and complied.At 14:00 we decided we had seen enough and ended our shift. We walked through the pedestrian passage,where we were asked by a soldier to present our ID cards, in front of the female soldier and also to put down bags for inspection.To complete that difficult shift, we saw two female soldiers walking with a big dog to inspect a Palestinian car. For 10 minutes the dog jumped to their orders in and out of the car. Nothing suspicious was found and the driver was allowed to go on his way.