Za’atarra Huwwara, Beit Furick, Saturday 4.2.06 PM Observers: Tal B., Deb L., Elat B.(reporting)SUMMARY:Average wait of vehicles leaving Nablus—3.5 hours. A detainee kept for 6.5 hours at Hawarre BINGO! “What a pity” – The reaction of a soldier at a rolling CP when asked if he were aware that there are 41 vehicles waiting on line According to N., a DCO representative is invisibly visible (or was he visibly invisible?) when he comes to the CP at 16:00 .Za’atara 14:00-Everyone is checked. Everyone is permitted to pass except those from Jenin. Two vehicles with Israeli license plates are detained. The people are from Jerusalem. The first car is held for 20 minutes until it is allowed to go. “We’re not coming here any more,” the driver says in despair. The second vehicle did not want our help. A bus is checked and all the young men are told to leave the bus. IDs of all the passengers are checked. Some passengers told us the bus waited for 4 hours at Hawarre. The passengers are returned to the bus but then the officer announces that there is someone in the bus from Nablus and he should give himself up or everyone will have to get off the bus again. The passengers don’t want to leave the bus and the officer collects all the IDs, goes over each and every one again, and sees that it is an elderly man who is the guilty one. The soldier decides to use his better judgment, allows the man stay on the bus, and the bus is allowed to leave the checkpoint.14:46 – 18 vehicles are waiting on line going southward and three from the west.Yitzar 14:56 -30 vehicles going southward are waiting to be checked. They form a double line so as not to block the intersection. In front of a building closest to the CP there is a minibus with Israeli license plates that has been detained with its passengers since 12:30. Two drivers from Jerusalem who speak Hebrew and seven passengers from Nablus. The soldiers say the detained are left from the last shift and they have been waiting in the present shift at least an hour. Calls are made to Asaf from the DCO, N., The Army Humanitarian Hot Line, and Hannah B. The detainees were released at 15:40.15:32 Hawarre -In the Southern CP of Hawarre, there is a police jeep. Two Boarder Police are standing in the passageway and randomly checking young men going in both directions while chatting in a “friendly” manner in Arabic.In the Northern CP there is a police jeep which is stationed on the side near the vehicle line. There are no police in the CP itself, it is run by soldiers.Four vehicles on line entering Nablus.Twenty vehicles including buses and trucks leaving Nablus. Despite this long line of vehicles, there is only one checking station for vehicles leaving Nablus the whole time we are there.Five detainees. Two of them have been there since 12:30. There are over 100 pedestrians waiting on line.Two soldiers are checking IDs at the booths and there is a “humanitarian” line.Three couples(one checks and one holds a gun) of soldiers are doing the body and parcel check. They stand outside the cement boarders of the pedestrian line between the two sets of turnstiles. Two couples are on the east side and one couple on the west side.One of the young men waiting on the line, where everyone is packed like sardines and there is no room to hold a bag, holds his bag outside the cement wall that he is crushed against. A soldier yells to him, “Keep the bag inside the line.” He answers, “There is no room.” The soldier yells back, “If there is no room then go home.” Now that’s a great solution! How come the man didn’t think of that himself? R., officer of the CP, requests that the detainee( who we later learn is detained until 19:00) give him his cell phone number and writes it down.15:43 – N. doesn’t know what the situation is with the detainees from the junction at Yatzar. Further he says, “I can’t answer everyone that calls. Why isn’t there a DCO Representative at the CP.” To Hannah he says, “We are not working for MW.” Two Israeli women leave Nablus and are sent to the police jeep. Two Israeli men who wanted to enter Nablus are warned that they can enter but when they leave, they will get a 3,000 sheqel fine. They decide to return home instead.15:46 – 3 detainees. R. tells us, “They are very dangerous.” When asked why there isn’t an additional checking point for the vehicles leaving Nablus, he answers that it is done “according to the need…” One of the detainees is taken to an army jeep which has arrived. He sits at the back of the jeep surrounded by 4 soldiers while he talks on his cell phone. He is then blind folded and handcuffed behind his back and taken away in the jeep. Will he be released today?15:56 – 6 detaineesTry to talk to one of the detainees who is not in the usual place but on the cement block under the tower near the vehicles being checked from Nablus. We can’t communicate. He only speaks Arabic.16:09 – 150 pedestrians waiting on line.16:11 – Another detainee is taken to the police jeep. It turns out he is deaf. The police (who may be a Druz)speaks Arabic and talks to the detainee through a translator who uses sign language. Despite our attempts, we didn’t succeed in understanding what the problem was concerning the deaf man being detained, or how the translator suddenly appeared. The two are released and go on their way. The policeman, in response to Tal’s questions, makes it very clear that it will not be worth her while to cross him.Deborah notes that it takes about 19 minutes for young men pedestrians to pass through the checkpoint.16:20 – We learn that the minibus that was detained at Yitzhar since 12:30 was released a half hour ago.16:21 – 8 vehicles waiting to enter Nablus. Five detainees. Two of them have been there since 12:30 !!!! A soldier checks by telephone, “Any answer concerning the first ‘Bingo’?” Tal says to R., “You can’t keep a person detained more then 4 hours.” The answer is, “I can if that is what the Shabak requests.” 16:29 – It is noted that the boarder police at the southern CP are no longer there.16:34 – 3 detainees (2 are the ones from 12:30). A taxi arrives at the CP and wants to enter Nablus. He has an older woman in the front seat who is obviously very sick. She can hardly keep her eyes open and she is leaning back on the seat. In the back seat there is another woman who is accompanying the sick one. The driver wants to enter Nablus, even though he doesn’t have a permit, in order to bring the woman to the hospital. R. will not let him pass but manages to convince the driver in the car behind the taxi to take the 2 women to the hospital. The sick woman barely makes the transfer to the other car. There seems to be some problem with the driver but R. okays his entrance into Nablus. We took some pictures of this event. We’ll see how they come out. (Where are the video cameras. When will we learn how to use them.)16:38 – 2 detainees – one of them is still from 12:30.16:42 – A minibus gets to the front of the line. They left Nablus at 12:30 and are just arriving now. It takes 10 minutes for the soldiers to check the minibus. We call the Army Hot Line. I talk with the DCO of Nabllus and I’m told that a DCO Representative was at the CP and didn’t see anything unusual. He didn’t make his presence known to us nor did we see him. This is curious.16:52 – 50 Pedestrians. 7 vehicles entering Nablus and 20 vehicles leaving Nablus. One of the checking stations of vehicles isn’t manned. We complain again to R. about the long line leaving Nablus and he tells us, “There is nothing that can be done.”17:05 – There are 6 vehicles entering Nablus. 4 are trucks. (Anwarta the commercial CP is closed on Saturday.) A taxi, whose driver is from Hebron and has come from Jenin through Nablus, is forced to make a U turn and go back to Nablus after waiting on line for 3 hours. Maybe 15 pedestrians on line. 17:16 – A small commercial van arrives at the CP from Nablus after waiting for three and a quarter hours on line . He must take out all of the cartons from his truck and place them on the road.17:20 – An ambulance is passed through quickly.17:22 – A bus which we took note of at 15:35 as being somewhere in the middle of the long line of vehicles, gets to the front line (almost 2 hours later and that’s not all he has waited since we didn’t see when he arrived at the line) . We left and didn’t see how long it took to check the bus with all the passengers and parcels. Who knows when they finished and continued on their way only to go through the whole process again at Yitzhar and Za’atara or wherever….They will get to Ramallah , with some luck, after 19:00. The vehicle that we could make out as the last in line at 16:18 can barely been seen far away in the darkening horizon. The detainee from 12:30 is still there. R. promises us he’ll take him home with him. Very funny! The detainee that is sitting on the cement block under the tower near the vehicles that are leaving Nablus , is still there. He is probably a frozen ice man by now. If the DCO Representative that supposedly was here at 16:00 had spoken to us, we could have found out who this detainee was, why he was there rather then in the regular place, and how long he had been there. 17:10 BEIT FURIK -According to the soldiers, the CP was opened at 5:15 this morning. The entrance to Nablus is forbidden after 17:00. The entrance from Nablus is until 20:00. The taxi drivers tell us that people from the ages of 15 to 30 who are from Beit Furik, are forbidden to pass in either direction all day.17:28 Yitzhar Junction -30 vehicles waiting at the CP17:32 Jit Junction -41 vehicles coming from the east are waiting one line. The line curves around the road for about a quarter of a kilometer. We go to the head of the line to ask the soldiers if they know there are over 40 vehicles on line. A soldier responds by saying, “What a pity.” We called Nabuani once again. This time he was rather patient with us and promised he’d check into the situation at Jit and to the status of the detainee at Hawarre who was still detained. Hundreds of people, taking tens of thousands of hours to go where they have to and this is only between 14:00 and 19:00. And this we call stopping terrorism?The student who was detained from 12:30 was released at 19:00 and allowed to go on his way. His father called Tal B. and told her that his son is constantly stopped at Hawarre . Hagar wrote about a similar story. We should check if this is the same person and even if not if there is something that can be done about it. That is, besides joining the “Shabak” (The Security Service).And what happen to the iceman? We will never know. One thing we can be sure of. His freezing to death is preventing terrorism.