Qalandiya - due to a computer mishap, hundreds wait for hours to cross
No ointment, just flies.
When - Saturday morning on my screen - I saw Zachariya Zbeide sitting there blindfolded, my heart was broken. I photographed it and decided that I would return to Qalandiya the next day, to the people who spoke with me five days previously in praise of the escape and in praise of Zachariya, in order to talk and listen and understand their train of thought.
Now, as then, Zachariya’s name is carried by all in praise, and I cannot stop looking at the photo and seeing his face before it was blown up by his captors blows, in the part one sees, for there is no knowing what was done to parts of his body that are unseen. Those who caught him must have taken out on him all their frustration, their offended and humiliated feelings.
That’s our life, said my friend.
There is no Palestinian on either side of the wall whose mind suggests that this is the end of the story, that Zachariya and his friends will end their lives between bars.
Everyone is certain that those who escaped prison and were caught will be the first to be released in the prisoner deal being closed between the Hamas and Israel.
Waiting for the ambulances – the one coming from Palestine and the one from East Jerusalem – is a lesson in patience for a neurotic woman like me. For them, for the Palestinians, patience is basic to their survival skills. A woman was transferred who had been treated in hospital in Nablus and did not survive, and her body accompanied by her brother was on its way home, to Gaza.
Computer mishap, or as they call it in the Israeli army’s laundered language – “the computers fell”. And without computers activity ceases. No one is inspected and no one crosses over from the West bank.
Hundreds of people waited and waited in vain. Since 2 o’clock it’s been like this, and no one tells us until when this will go on, they said. There were people there on their way to hospitals in East Jerusalem, people post-surgery and treatment in hospitals in the West Bank sitting hopeless and exhausted, waiting to see when they could proceed home to Gaza, people on their way to their nightshift at the plant, and people who simply wanted to get back home to their family on the other side of the checkpoint. Our phone calls to hotlines were not answered, or we heard recording instructing us to call the next morning…
An hour later, when I noticed that things would stay the way they were, I decided to try my luck and cross the vehicle checkpoint. One man blocked me with his body, saying ‘if you continue walking, they will kill you, they shoot anyone walking here’.
The man took me under his wing, stopped a car in front of the entrance gate, we both sat down in the back seat of the strange car and with the new friend whom I don’t really know, we crossed the checkpoint.
I got out of there in one piece, without getting shot and at a reasonable time thanks to a resourceful man. But what happened to hundreds of people who do not hold the right – blue (Israeli) – ID?
Two days later I heard from a friend who had been present there that the road opened only when night fell, that after 7 p.m. people began to be inspected and cross.
But there is a fly in the ointment – true, most people did cross eventually, but those headed for the Gaza Strip were blocked and had to spend the night in the West Bank.
No ointment, only flies.