Barta'a-Reihan, Tura-Shaked
Barta'a checkpoint 06:10
The checkpoint is full of workers waiting for their transportation, taxi drivers waiting for passengers, all trying to make a living. People who are done with the process in the terminal are coming up the sleeve
[a narrow fenced area, leading to the terminal or out of it],. We walk towards the lower parking lot, on the Palestinian side. People are coming and going through the terminal all the time, and we see a long line of people who have gone through the turnstiles and past the woman soldier in the shed, and are waiting to enter the building itself. There does not seem to be any pressure. We selected several people, and then went up to the upper parking lot on the seamline zone, to see how long they had been inside. The three people we chose came out fifteen and twenty minutes later.
Tura checkpoint 07:00
The checkpoint is open, and some of the soldiers are already inside, and one more soldier is coming up now.
On the West Bank side, the Tura side, people are waiting to enter the turnstile and the inspection room. At 7:10 the first one emerges from the West Bank side into the seamline zone, and then the others follow. A school headmaster and some teachers who came with him were the first to enter from the seamline zone on their way to work in the West Bank. Children/pupils arrive on foot from the nearby village and go through the Tura checkpost without being checked. The fabric of life is being woven. [The "fabric of life" is the military term for the checkpoints they opened in the separation wall, to enable the population to keep their contact through the wall that has torn their lives apart].
As we were talking about what had happenned in Tura a week ago, about the young couple from Tura who stayed overnight with the wife's parents in the village of Um Reihan, in the seamline zone, and soldiers had broken into their house and behaved as though they owned it. According to a person whom we always meet here, who had told us that this couple are his family, his son knocked at the door while the soldiers had been there. They cuffed him, and beat him until he lost consciousness. The officer who had been there stopped the beating, and woke the son up. Ruthie suggested that he file a complaint, and gave him the phone number of our friend in "Yesh Din" (there is law) organization, but he was afraid, and said that his son would not want to file a complaint. This is not the first time we meet a Palestinian who has been beaten, but is afraid to file a complaint about the soldier's aggression.
Towards eight o'clock we got back to the Barta'a checkpoint, in order to take the boy Ali to Rambam hospital (in Haifa). We saw women going down the sleeve, apparently the seamstresses from Yabed, who work in the sewing workshops in Barta'a. Are they back from night shift? We could not tell.