Qalandiya, Fri 3.2.12, Morning
09:25: The parking lot is full. The waiting area in front of the lanes is also filling up. Prayers' day. There are three lanes and the 'humanitarian' lane for the sick and elderly – functioning. Five checking counters are open. Men, women, children and infants, all crowded in the queues. The persons on line reported that they had been waiting for the security check for about an hour.
The turnstile functioned and entrapped in it two women crushed together, probably in order to enable both to emerge simultaneously. None of the soldiers noticed the incident and the poor women awaited the next evolvement of their trap.
An officer explained to the Palestinians in Arabic and to us in Hebrew, that kids up to five years of age, accompanied by parents or grandparents, were required to be registered within the system, over five years old they will need to hold a proper passage permit. He said he was doing them a special favor by barring their passage, as otherwise the police would confine them later.
09:45: A grandmother accompanying three grandkids abandons the queue after having waited on line for some time.
At a certain stage, the elderly seem to be restlessly shifting from the 'humanitarian' queue to the normal queue, trying to figure out where they had better chances of speeding up the passage process.
09:55: The 'humanitarian' lane becomes shorter whereas the other queues grow and shrink sporadically. Here and there you encounter an elderly person coming equipped with a small stool – where are they going to place it in these crowded circumstances?
10:20: The 'humanitarian' queue vanished and the others shrank considerably.
A Palestinian complained that there were no toilets at the site – 'what are the women, waiting for so long, supposed to do?' We do not carry a ready answer – we have been repeating in nearly every one of our reports this non-civilized situation of lack of toilets in a passage accommodating so many people for such lengths of time.