Qalandiya
A difficult morning.
5:05 queues up to the parking lot.
Only four posts are active out of the three enclosures' lanes.
5:30 All the posts are opened, but the queues remain long. In only two enclosures.
A girl soldier in the aquarium opens lanes at a low frequency, and the beginning of pressure is felt in the air.
People say that yesterday and the day before yesterday it was thus too. And that there also were quarrels. It is assumed that this is done on purpose. We suppose that the soldiers are new ones.
5:50 Soldiers arrive at the aquarium.
6:00 People begin crowding in from the sides. Those who stand in line push back.
Five women try to enter from the side. Usually women are allowed to go to the beginning of the queue, but now the group is too big and they try to push in too harshly. People get angry and narrow the spaces, a heap of people is created, blows, jolting and shouts.
6:10 An officer from the DCO opens the humanitarian gate.
In the meantime the assaults on the enclosures continue. Grave shoving from both directions. Shouts. We talk with a few people who went to the side. They are desperate and angry about the situation: "they turned us into a herd of donkeys", "people fear for their livelihood". They tell us that yesterday they arrived at work (in building sites for instance) at 9:00 in the morning. Others returned home. At the humanitarian gate a few men without certificates try their luck as there is no possibility to enter the enclosures. Without success.
6:50 Miraculously – two men volunteer to stand at the head of two lanes and begin to organize things. They pass the men one by one according to their place in the queue and don't allow them to push. The shoving is put a stop to. The end of days…
7:05 We passed through the humanitarian passage and arrived a lane no. 5. We waited there 40 minutes in a short queue, which didn't move. Sluggishness and inefficiency which explain the long queue of this morning.
7:45 That's it. We left.