Shaked, Rihan, Saturday, August 12, 2006, AMObservers: Shula N, Rachel C (reporting)07:30 – 10:00Shaked, 07:30A young woman with a week-old baby wrapped in a blanket, alongside her two small children. They are from nearby Dahar al-Malak. The woman is taking her baby to a clinic in nearby Tura, on the Palestinian side of the checkpoint. She is not on the soldier’s list, and so she cannot pass here (for a three-minute walk), but through Rihan (a half-hour journey). Dalia from the Humanitarian Center asks: “Does she have a humanitarian pass?” R. from the Jenin District Coordination Office: “She has a pass to cross at Rihan, so why is she using Shaked?” She gets the logical explanation.07:50: “I need approval from an officer. Call in 10 minutes’ time…” In another 10 minutes the gate will close, and the reservists on the spot will not concede… R. says she will ensure that the gate stay open if the officer approves.07:58: The gate is about to be closed. R.: “I will talk to them…” But none of the soldiers pick up the phone.08:00: The phone is picked up. The gate is opened, after it had already been closed, and the woman and her children are invited to cross.We politely refuse an invitation to coffee that immediately follows her “thank you,” complete with (justified) complaints about the absence of freedom of movement, and the theft of private land and livelihood for the benefit of the checkpoint and the fence.We wanted to ask the soldiers the purpose of the new structure placed next to the turnstile at the entrance from Tura, but in their anger at us they refuse to answer. They walk to their camp. Rihan, 08:15In the parking lot there are four commercial vehicles and three private cars. “Always on Saturday they open at 07:00, but today only at 08:00, and so far only five have passed…”There is relatively heavy pressure (25-30 people) at the pedestrian gate. A call: “All back.” One of the waiting crowd acts as usher, makes a list of all comers and calls them to the gate according to it. Three pairs enter, then a break.In the parking lot there are two or three vehicles, none of them with vegetables, eggs or other produce.08:30: 25 waiting. Food boxes arrive. No entry.A soldier (one of the five stationed facing the yellow gate): “There is pressure in the terminal, be patient. We are patient.”08:35: Rotem from the DCO will clarify.08:47: They begin to pass people through again. Eight enter, and again a break.09:10: Rotem from the DCO will clarify.The usher has changed (the first one has gone through). The soldiers contend that there is pressure inside the terminal (who is pressing, when they are all standing outside?).09:15: They begin tp pass people in a flow, two at a time. By 09:20, 38 people are passed through. Some of them have been waiting since 08:00.On the way down the sleeve we are stopped by a soldier: “Closed military area!”A line behind the southbound vehicle checkpoint. A car is being checked. All its contents are spread on the road — the “home” of a family that worked in Tamra (picking cucumbers), and is now returning to … where? The family members (a man, his wife and six small children) are watching in agony through the sleeve fence, as a gas balloon is declared forbidden: “How will we cook food for the children?”A taxi from Nazareth (yellow Israeli plates) with a mother and three children from Tarshiha. Pressured by the rain of Katyusha rockets, they want to cross to Zita, where the woman’s sister lives. Forbidden!!! Why? No answer. A soldier explains that if we were to ask, he would pass us: “After all, Jews live there, don’t they?”Rotem from the DCO directs us to the Public Affairs Officer, who does not answer. Quite reasonably, she doesn’t work on Saturday. We leave them wondering whether to go to Zita via Tira. We give them phone numbers, so that “ as Israeli citizens” they can use them.At 10:00 we leave.