Qalandiya, Mon 2.8.10, Afternoon
15:30, Qalandiya: Traffic was flowing on the road to the CP and there were no lines inside. Two active passageways (3 and 4) served holders of blue (Israeli) ID cards, both men and women. There was no line at all in Passageway No. 1, for those with Palestinian IDs.
We noticed a man waiting in Passageway 5, the passageway for the DCO offices. No one was paying him any attention and time was running out (as the offices close at 4 PM). We called both headquarters and the DCO asking them to open the passageway, but nothing happened. The man was trying to get a permit to bury a dead relative. After waiting almost half an hour, a soldier arrived, checked his papers and made a phone call (to his superiors?), then he took him to the DCO offices.
16:00: A young woman pushing an empty wheelchair, accompanied by a civilian security guard (who opened the "humanitarian gates
" for her), arrived and got in line in Passageway 4. As Natanya and I wondered how she would get through the passageway and tried to figure out how we could be of help, the computer crashed so that any strategy we thought of would be useless. And then Natanya thought to phone Keinan (who had been very helpful last week). He arrived in no time flat and escorted the girl with the wheelchair through the CP via external gates.
16:30: The computer was up again. At 16:40 we two also managed to reach the Jerusalem side of the CP. There we met three young women from abroad, members of several women's organizations. They had tried to cross through the CP with their passports and had been ushered into the examination room for questioning. One of them, a woman from Japan, had spent a long time in the interrogation room as she had no Israeli visa in her passport (she had requested that her passport not be stamped when she entered the country). Apparently, the procedure is to check entry of foreign visitors against files of the Interior Ministry (so that in principle it is possible to cross a CP without a visa in your passport).
16:50: In the Western passageway, for people leaving Jerusalem and entering the West Bank, only 2 of the 4 biometric machines were operating. The laborers returning from their day's work had no problem and passed through quickly.
17:30: No lines in the internal passageways and almost no one in the northern shed aside from several laborers waiting for a ride home. We left Qalandiya to return to Jerusalem. En route we passed through Lil/Jabba and Hizmeh CPs. There were no lines in either and traffic was flowing.