Al Jib (Givat Zeev), Qalandiya, Sun 9.10.11, Afternoon

Translating: Ruth Fleishman

Qalandiya checkpoint:
The soldier and security guard spent  45 minutes making inquiries and running about from the ambulance to their post and back again, while a Palestinian ambulance that was transferring the body of a man who  used to live in Gaza but didn't survive the operation he went through in Nablus, and an Israeli ambulance at the other side of the checkpoint, were being detained only several meters away from each other, until finally all doubt was lifted and the deceased was found to be "Kosher", he wasn't, god forbid, a terrorist or a ticking bomb, and so all the obstructions were removed and the carcass could return home.
The heat wave probably did not agree with the deceased.

El Gib checkpoint:
While we were sitting under the fig tree at "Unis's Deli" drinking hot coffee and eating Falafel that had just been taken out from the boiling oil, the locals told about their lives:
 
They told us how laborers wait during the morning hours in lines that stretch for hundreds of meters like cattle so as to arrive to work at Givon Hahadasha, about the soldiers that "have no respect for human beings", about the curses and insults that they have to take from the soldiers that in spite of them knowing everyone (after all it's always the same people that pass every day), they make it hard for them and hold long inspections so that at times in it not until the late morning hours that everyone pass. But there's no point in going to work at that hour since the employer would just send the laborer back home. And so they lose a day of work which adds up to between 120 to 140 Shekels.
"The laborers", said one person "work like donkeys. But only the rich get richer, the contractors".  

We were told about a teenager of fourteen who climbed over the fence (he wanted to visit his mother in hospital at east Jerusalem) and had been ratted in to the police by a well-known snitch from the village. The boy was taken in and now his is serving time in an Israeli prison.

People told us of hundreds of dunams of fertile land that had been confiscated when the separation wall was erected, and of the ancient olive trees that grew in that land but were uprooted and taken to far away and foreign lands.

On the other side of the road a Jewish contractor and his Palestinian workers were building a roof on top of the lane in front of the checkpoint. A generous sovereign makes sure that the heads of those who build houses for settlers on their own stolen land with their own blood, sweat and tears, don't get wet in the rain and don't scorch under the blazing sun.