Morning

As of last week, several dozen Palestinian (green and white) plated busses and minibuses from the Hebron district are back on the road, but under many restrictions: drivers must hold permits from the Civil Administration (month long permit); vehicles are not allowed to depart from Hebron (regardless of whether or not the town is under curfew), but rather from the roadblocks near Halhul; buses are not allowed to enter any Palestinian town or village, buses and passengers are subjected to lengthy checks at Etzion junction (about half way from Halhul to Bethlehem) as a consequence of which the journey of many will be cut even shorter.The same scene takes place over and over again: a bus coming from the direction of Hebron arrives at the checkpoint and is made to stop. The driver then collects IDs from all passengers and hands them over to a soldier - one of five or six who staffed the checkpoint - who soon afterwards orders passengers to climb off. Those without permits are ordered to leave by the officer in charge. Some pleas from passengers are then "reviewed" by the officer, and eventually the bus is allowed to continue with approximately half the number of passengers on board. None of those who carry valid permits work in Israel; rather most work in the major settlements of the Bethlehem region: Efrat and Beitar IIlit, and others in Maale Adumim and Kochav Yaacov (near Ramallah) settlements, to which they travel through Wad-a-Nar. In short, in order to enter Bethlehem, a Palestinian from Hebron needs a permit to work in an Israeli settlement. One passenger, dressed in relatively fancy clothes, is a manager at the Bethlehem branch of the Arab Bank who lives in Idna village (West of Hebron). In the (now distant) past the journey from home to work took him 25 minutes, he says. Now it's been more than three weeks since he last entered Bethlehem, and he does not know whether today's journey, that began before 6 AM will bring him to his workplace, or end in vain. Another man is on his way for a medical check at a Bethlehem clinic. The officer told the man, "get your treatment in Hebron". A young guy with a permit to work in Kochav Yaacov is also prevented from re-boarding the bus: true that he holds a permit, but in the attached photo he is wearing sun-glasses, which make him a potential suspect, the officer comments. At one stage, , the Palestinians could not take any more of this, and a mini-scale act of defiance began: dozens of men and fewer women climb off one bus and start walking northbound, to be joined a few minutes later by the passengers of a second bus and a third one. The soldiers and officer began to lose control, and eventually gave in, at least temporarily. We offer a lift to a man from the crowd who is carrying a baby girl in his arms, and who turns out to be a resident of al-Aroub camp. He is taking his ill daughter to Augusta Victoria hospital in east Jerusalem, where patients of UNRWA clinics are sent to receive (more serious) medical treatment. We drop him off at El-Khadr roadblocks, from where he will continue his journey through Wad a-Nar. During the short ride he tells us that yesterday the IDF uprooted more than a hundred trees, many of which were more than 50 years old, in the compounds and environs of the al-Aroub agricultural college.