Qalandiya, Tue 27.3.12, Morning

  Qalandiya 05:00, on a cold, crowded, sad morning.

Tomorrow morning we’ll again rise early and go to Qalandiya, to see whether anyone reads the desperate reports we’ve been writing these past months, whether anyone even cares.

Every report begins with a desperate cry – Open all the inspection stations at 04:30, so the checkpoint won’t be a chaotic nightmare at 07:00.

You, the security personnel, are responsible for inspections at the checkpoint but, above all, your job is to provide a service.  Your obligation is to admit everyone who has the necessary permits and to responsibly carry out inspections in a manner that will provide security to Israelis – but you must also remember that people aren’t coming to the checkpoint to have a good time.  They’re hurrying to work, to doctors’ appointments, to school – and you, the security personnel, are morally obligated to move them through the inspection labyrinth as quickly as possible, ease the daily agony caused by the occupation.

Last Friday we came to the checkpoint early, at 05:00, to see whether our assumption was correct, that it takes a long time for people to go through at this hour of the morning.

We discovered that only 60% of the inspection stations were operating, and even they were working only half as fast as they did later on.

Last Tuesday the situation was so intolerable that even if people had wanted to let the elderly and sick go to the head of the humanitarian line they wouldn’t have been able to do so because hundreds of needy people stood crowded on the humanitarian line for a long time, an hour or more.  No one had a chance.

Nothing worked that morning.  The revolving gates got stuck, inspections took forever and the lines kept getting longer.  Men, women and children, who no longer had the strength to hold their places on line, because they were too weak or too old or too ill, crowded beneath the canopy.

And then, all at once, at 07:05, after half an hour during which no laborers came through, and only the humanitarian gate had intermittently opened and closed, it happened.

The masses of laborers crowded in the plaza pushed against a side gate that might have been unlocked, or whose lock might have broken by the force of so many people pressing against it.  More than a hundred people flowed in and flooded the inspection stations.

At this point the security personnel lost control of the situation.  They sent staff to repair the gate that people had broken through, and then shut down the checkpoint while approximately 500 people were at various stages of the inspection and crossing procedure.  Most of them had already been at the checkpoint for two and a half hours, with no end in sight.

About 50 people who had gone through the humanitarian gate and were waiting at inspection lane number 5 were sent back.  Some had waited more than an hour and a half in the humanitarian lane.  Twenty other younger men were taken to the rear, apparently suspected of having been among those who broke in.  It appeared they were ejected from the checkpoint.

For 50 minutes, the checkpoint didn’t operate at all!  The revolving gates weren’t working, frustrated laborers began returning home, giving up a day of work.  Sick people who no longer had any strength also gave up and returned to suffer silently at home.  The noise of the whistles and the yelling was deafening.  The checkpoint simply wasn’t working.

Suddenly a solution was improvised to ease the misery of the elderly, the pupils and the women.  Some of the security personnel began moving dozens of women, children and ill people to the checkpoint exit via the DCO path in the back, bypassing inspection.

Congestion eased at about 09:00, after four horrible hours at an unbearably overcrowded checkpoint, after hundreds of people lost a day of their life and returned home disappointed, after even someone who managed to get through had spent 2-3 hours doing so, after all sides were exhausted.

All that congestion and chaos could have been prevented had the people in charge opened all the inspection stations already at 04:30.  Had they stationed technicians on site when the checkpoint was less congested to insure the revolving gates didn’t get stuck repeatedly.  Had they… had they…had they…

And I think to myself:  Imagine that the situation had been reversed, that hundreds and thousands of Israelis were stuck in the morning, every morning, at a checkpoint on their way to their daily routine.  I can’t even imagine trying to describe what would happen there.