Qalandiya, Mon 26.9.11, Afternoon

When we reached Qalandiya at 4 PM, the CP was almost empty.  Only one passageway was working.  No one was waiting in the DCO line or in the DCO shed.  We asked the candy vendor in the northern shed, who told us that this was the way things had been for the past 2-2.5 hours.  He couldn't tell us why.

 

Slowly but surely the flow of pedestrians gathered strength.  By 4:30 there were 40 people waiting on line in Passageway 4 with a similar number waiting outside in the northern shed.  We phoned the Humanitarian Hotline and the Passageway Unit to describe the situation and request that they open another passageway, but nothing happened.  With only one active passageway, if there are problems with anyone's papers the whole mass of waiting humanity gets stuck indefinitely….  The numbers of waiting people continued to grow and we continued to phone without any results.  At 5 PM we phoned headquarters and spoke with a soldier who reported that the soldiers on duty in the CP had told him they were opening another line.  But the second line opened only at 5:20.  Within only a short while the lines shrank and disappeared.

We left the CP to return to Jerusalem at 5:30.