Tura checkpoint: The breaches are doing well. 'Working people do not carry out terrorist attacks'
15:00-17:00
Everything is humming along at all the checkpoints as well as the breaches in the fence. Everyone is feeling good for some reason. In any case, our shift comprised three meetings.
At Emricha, we met S., “the Bedouin.” He sent his son out to the main road to direct us to him with the bags of clothes we were bringing (a gift from a friend from Kibbutz Yagur). He himself doesn’t work, but he tends the small chicken coop next to his home. His sons work. One works for a butcher in western Bak’a. He’s doing OK, hamdallilah (thank God). The children are home because of Covid.
At the Tura-Shaked checkpoint, we sat in the car and watched things carry on quietly. Cars come and go. And people go from one side to the other, as if that’s the way of the world: you visit relatives or go to the shops in the local town via a checkpoint manned by soldiers. Two of them, a man and a woman, kitted out from head-to-toe, approach us. The name Taoz regiment is emblazoned on their uniforms. After we’ve introduced ourselves, the female soldier introduces themselves as “fighters of the crossings,” military police. Their base is on the other side of the Barta’a checkpoint (“Reihan crossing,” as she calls it), which we visited last week. The term “fighters of the crossings” is new to us, but it is there to be seen on the internet.
From there, we drove to check out the checkpoint by-pass, which Hannah reported on last week. We got there via the olive groves and fields of cloves and groundsel to the T-junction: On the left, the isolated house (cut off from Tura by the fence); on the right, the road leading towards the separation fence, partially blocked by a rock. The driver of a pick-up truck carrying a passenger managed to get past it. A worker from Ya’bed who had walked all the way here from the road tells us in good Hebrew (he’s worked in Israel for 22 years) that he’s come from his place of work in the Shahak (Shaked-Hinanit-Katzir) industrial park. His car is on the other side of the fence (he can’t cross the fence in the car) and this is the third time he’s crossed here. He doesn’t have a permit to cross at the nearby Tura checkpoint and can cross only at Barta’a. He’s very pleased with his work and altogether has mixed feelings. “I put the paper (election ballot?) in Palestine and my heart in Israel. In the end, we have to get along together.” He is in favor of the breaches “because a working person doesn’t carry out terror attacks.” He told us that during the manhunt for the escaped prisoners, there were two soldiers posted at every breach “from Jalameh to the South Hebron Hills, there is a breach every hundred meters and the army knows them all,” he laughed.
Barta’a-Reihan Checkpoint
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This checkpoint is located on the Separation Fence route, east of the Palestinian town of East Barta’a. The latter is the largest Palestinian community inside the seam-line zone (Barta’a Enclave) in the northern West Bank. Western Barta’a, inside Israel, is adjacent to it. The Checkpoint is open all week from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. Since mid-May 2007, the checkpoint has been managed by a civilian security company subordinate to the Ministry of Defense. People permitted to cross through this checkpoint into and from the West Bank are residents of Palestinian communities inside the Barta’a Enclave as well as West Bank Palestinian residents holding transit permit. Jewish settlers from Hermesh and Mevo Dotan cross here without inspection. A large, modern terminal is active here with 8 windows for document inspection and biometric tests (eyes and fingerprints). Usually only one or two of the 8 windows are in operation. Goods, up to medium commercial size, may pass here from the West Bank into the Barta’a Enclave. A permanent registered group of drives who have been approved by the may pass with farm produce. When the administration of the checkpoint was turned over to a civilian security firm, the Ya’abad-Mevo Dotan Junction became a permanent checkpoint. . It is manned by soldiers who sit in the watchtower and come down at random to inspect vehicles and passengers (February 2020).
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Tura-Shaked
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Tura-Shaked
This is a fabric of life* checkpoint through which pedestrians, cabs and private cars (since 2008) pass to and from the West Bank and the Seam-line Zone to and from the industrical zone near the settler-colony Shaked, schools and kindergartens, and Jenin university campuses. The checkpoint is located between Tura village inside the West Bank and the village of Dahar Al Malah inside the enclave of the Seam-line Zone. It is opened twice a day, between 7 a.m. and 10 a.m., and from 12 noon to 7 p.m. People crossing it (at times even kindergarten children) are inspected in a bungalow with a magnometer. Names of those allowed to cross it appear in a list held by the soldiers. Usually traffic here is scant.
- fabric of life roads and checkpoints, as defined by the Terminals Authority in the Ministry of Defense (fabric of life is a laundered name that does not actually describe any kind of humanitarian purpose) are intended for Palestinians only. These roads and checkpoints have been built on lands appropriated from their Palestinian owners, including tunnels, bypass roads, and tracks passing under bridges. Thus traffic can flow between the West Bank and its separated parts that are not in any kind of territorial contiguity with it. Mostly there are no permanent checkpoint on these roads but rather ‘flying’ checkpoints, check-posts or surprise barriers. At Toura, a small (less than one dunam) and sleepy checkpoint has been established, which has filled up with the years with nearly .every means of supervision and surveillance that the Israeli military occupation has produced. (February 2020)
Mar-21-2022Anin Checkpoint: A magnificent breach in the center of the checkpoint
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