Etzion DCL

A quiet morning....that is it would have been quiet but for the waiting room. It is torture to sit there and now with the heat people do not have the option of sitting outside. We are more and more convinced that the blasts of the radio are not there to entertain people but to make it as uncomfortable as possible to sit there. One cannot talk. It seems that the IDF has undergone a course in how to torture people by sound. They would probably like to be able to use the sound cannons which are now being used at demonstrations but are instead using the volume of the radio as an instrument of torture. 

It is not enough that the water fountain has not worked for years nor the women's toilet which is always locked. Bad enough that the Palestinians do not receive proper service there. That, unless there is someone there to show those thin enough to get through the turnstile in a humiliating way how to do so, they can wait there for ages until they get through. Again, this time, a man arrived on crutches and could not get through. We asked people inside to ask the soldiers to open the turnstile but, even though it was long past the time when the soldiers return form their lunch break at 12, there was no one in the offices. But the Palestinians can wait and, in any case, if the soldiers do not succeed in making sure of that, other soldiers at the checkpoints along the way are specialists in making sure that the Palestinians will know who is the lord of the land. 

Hanna Barag to whom we spoke, told us that a friend of hers had phoned to say that it was a catastrophe at 300, the Bethlehem checkpoint, and she went there at 7.30 and it was as bad, if not worse, than she had been told.  The computers had fallen and 100s and 1000s of people could not go through. People lost a day of work.

We again met the Israeli lady who had to go to hospital and needed her husband from the West Bank to come with her. Her little girl was very irritable because of the heat but two balloons solved that problem for a while.

And we had the pleasure of seeing how quickly the checkpoint at the Refaim Park is progressing so that the settlers who come to the park will not be bothered by the Palestinians whose land it rightfully is.