South Hebron

South Hebron Hills Sunday 26.09 04 AMWatchers: P.R, E.L (reporting)Summary: on most of the circuit the 'routine' of closure continued. At the Dura - Al Fawwar crossing there were detainees. There the closure had created Catch -22 situations (details below). At the Shiyuch-Hebron crossing there were no soldiers, but we were told about a group of soldiers who had gone on a violent rampage in Adisa village on Saturday night. color=red>We left Shoket junction at 6:30 and returned at 9:50Sinsana checkpoint (on the green line). It is ceasing to look temporary. There is a hut for the border police and a shed covered with netting for shade. Routine checks of cars were taking place. They recognized our car and we were not stopped.Shim'a CP remains abandoned.Turn-off to Samoa. The dirt barriers have been raised higher still. We saw a car searching for a way to cross route 60 and on the other side –from the direction of Dhahariya –two cars were stuck in a field and their passengers were standing outside apparently looking for a way to continue their journey.7:00 Dura - Al-Fawwar crossing: closed to vehicles. Pedestrian traffic in both directions was lively. 3 soldiers stood on the Dura side checking IDs. There were 17 detainees when we arrived. R. the checkpoint CO was very friendly towards us. He said that the criteria for detaining the men were age and family names and that he was waiting for the OK to come from the GSS. He said he had called the GSS several times already. We asked him how long the seventeen had been waiting and he said about half an hour ( one of the detainees told us that he had been waiting for 2 hours already) . During the 20 minutes we stood there (we left at 7:20) the GSS did not call and none of the 17 were let through. R. volunteered the information that his regimental CO (Lavi regiment) had ordered them very strictly to behave well to the Palestinians and that he –the regimental CO –would tolerate no exceptions. R. told us that when a soldier had slapped a boy who had been cheeky after being caught –the lad had been distributing leaflets ("with a nationalist content") and kept darting from one side to the other of the crossing with the soldiers running after him-the soldier had been confined to barracks by the regimental CO for 28 days and the CP commander "who had done nothing" had been given 14 days confinement.The soldiers opened the gate for a truck carrying water which crossed from Dura to the water station at al –Fawwar.The detainees were mainly students wanting to enter Hebron via Dura. There was also a school teacher from Beit Awwa who said that the children were waiting for him at the school in al-Fawwar and they would soon give up and go home. He was very angry – understandably so, since for him it was already very late –the OT have not yet gone over to winter time. He also said that today there "would be problems" at Beit Awwa because of the separation fence/wall and asked us to go there. He also said that in any case there would be supporters from Israel and from France there/As we left, one of the detainees said to us in English : "So what did you manage to do? You haven't helped us". Only too true, but at least we have borne witness to what was happening.8:55 Dura-Al- Fawwar crossing ( on the way back): all 17 detainees who had been there at 7:00 had gone. Instead there were 7 new detainees. We asked R. the checkpoint CO how long it had taken the 17 to pass through and he replied "About 40 minutes" and added that today the GSS was particularly slow. He said that the 7 new detainees had been waiting for about half an hour ( one of them said to us he had been waiting for 2 hours). We waited with them for 25 minutes and the GSS did not call the CO and none of the 7 were released- ie they waited in the sun for at least 55 minutes and pretty certainly for more than an hour.2 Catch 22 stories told to us by the Dura detainees: (A) A man in his fifties, dressed in work clothes (one of the 7 detainees), told us that he had spent 2 months in an Israeli prison because he had looked for work in Israel. He didn't have a magnetic card because one had to have an Israeli employer to get one. But to find an Israeli employer he had to enter Israel! "As long as I live I never want to enter Israel again", he said bitterly.(B) One of the detainees showed us his permit to enter Israel (except for Elat)-it was perfectly valid and expired only on 17.10. The CP commander (R) told us that because the Palestinian had received the permit before the closure began (the permit had been issued on 20.7), he had to get a new permit dated after the beginning of the closure. "But", said the Palestinian, "the Israelis won't issue new permits until the old ones have run their course!". Hence he had been detained and was waiting for the GSS to get back to the soldiers. R told us (and had explained this already to the detainees) that a short while ago he himself had detained a man at Zif junction who had a similar permit and it turned out that he was a member of Hamas who had shot at an Israeli bus.Sheep's crossing (Yatta –Hebron): closed to vehicles. No soldiers present and almost no pedestrians to be seen. On the Hebron side a narrow passage (wide enough only for one person at a time) had been made in an orderly fashion in the high dirt barrier. On route 60 beyond Yatta we drove behind and then overtook a very dusty Palestinians private truck. Either the driver had a special permit or he was taking a chance. We saw quite a number of military vehicles on route 60.7:40 Shiyukh –Hebron crossing ( the girls' school): No soldiers and, according to the taxi drivers, there had not been any before our arrival. A very lively trafiic of pedestrians – we saw a lot of young female students or high schoolgirls crossing from Shiyukh. When we went to talk to the Shiyukh taxi drivers we were told a most unpleasant story. On Saturday night between 21:00 and 21:00 a taxi driver had been on his way from Shiyukh to Bani Na'im via dirt roads (of course, not via route 60) and he stopped en route at a gas station in the village of Adisa (apparently in Area A).Suddenly a number of Israeli soldiers (about 5) appeared on foot and demanded his car's registration card and his keys. He was forced to hand them over and the soldiers then disappeared. He said he was now forced to sell his taxi for scrap since he could not drive it. While he was telling us this, another taxi driver approached and said that that same night the soldiers (apparently the same ones) had entered a house in Adisa and smashed up the furniture, including the TV and had broken the windows. There was only a woman and small children there and also an old man of 70. They hit the old man and knocked him to the floor, -and "they also threw a smoke bomb into the house", added the taxi driver, at the end of his story.A third taxi driver told us that he had come that same night from Bani Na'im to Adisa and a group of soldiers (obviously the same ones)- took out their knives and cut up his tires. A driver aged about 50 said that they behaved in this way because they were young and there was no officer with them . "An officer would not have allowed it", he said"- it was a bit surprising to hear from such a source an "extenuating" circumstance, as it were. After all, gross misbehavior by soldiers has not been exactly rare during the last few years.8:05 Halhul- Hebron bridge: the pillbox was manned and the bridge was closed to pedestrians by a dirt barrier and barbed wire on the Halhul side and by a locked gate on the Hebron side. But masses of people were crossing between Halhul and Hebron on route 35 , via dirt paths –some 100 meters from the bridge. And there were no soldiers there. The logic behind closing the bridge under these circumstances remains mysterious. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the army simply wants to harrass the Palestinians for the sake of harassing them. 8:15: Idhna CP. The gate was locked, The pillbox was manned. There was no traffic of any kind.Ras al Jura CP (the humanitarian gate): When we passed there on our way to Halhul- Hebron bridge, 6 cars had been waiting to be checked by the soldiers at the gate. But the checking seemed to be going smoothly. When we returned on our way back at 8:45 we stopped there to see how long it would take an ambulance which we saw arrive to get through. The soldiers checked the contents of the ambulance fairly sketchily, and it was on its way to Hebron within five minutes. Only 2 cars were waiting to be checked when we left. We decided to return via Dura in order to see what had happened there in our absence (see above "Dura-Al- Fawwar crossing ( on the way back):").9:40: Past Dura, on the way to Shoket, we saw an empty lorry which had got stuck in attempting to cross a dirt barrier onto route 60 – it was impossible to know if the keys had been taken from the driver as a "punishment" or if the driver had simply abandoned it