Al Jib checkpoint, Issawiya
We arrived at 5:40, just as dawn was breaking. Crowds are waiting in the long pen, at the turnstile and in front to the checking booth. Progress is horribly slow, procedures ridiculously inefficient : first the permit is shown to the soldier behind glass, then a few steps forward until a door is opened. 3-5 enter at the soldier's decision, check at the magnometer (which beeps a lot but who cares) and then on to another window for fingerprinting and a wait for approval. Only then, passage through another door and on to the day's work for the occupier. While people wait in the room between the two doors, the soldier stops checking permits. When we arrived there was only one soldier performing all these tasks.
Later another soldier arrived to supervise passage through the magnometer and the fingerprinting. But the wait for someone o glance at the permits continued. At first, 3 crossed simultaneously, then 5, perhaps in honour of our presence. Waiting time did not improve, perhaps only the feeling of movement. It's hard to estimate crossing time because of the crowding and our inconvenient vantage point, but each person had to wait at least 15 minutes, although Jib is a small checkpoint. The Palestinian will always wait.
Compared to what we saw in the past, few women were crossing. We saw two minibuses transporting women who did not require the pedestrian crossing. This is an improvement from in terms of saving time, as well as decreasing the pressure in the line. The few women at the pedestrian crossing were given precedence.
There was little traffic in the vehicular crossing. During more than the hour and one half of our stay about a dozen vehicles crossed. Two sit in the checking booth doing almost nothing. Boredom breeds harassment of Palestinians just to show who is the boss here. One of the border-policemen shouted (in Hebrew) at those passing through the turnstile because, in his opinion, they were too many -- this despite the fact that the line proceeded in an orderly and quiet fashion. "We'll start working more slowly" was one of his threats. While we were wondering how much slower, he shifted to yelling in Arabic. People asked us to come more frequently to this checkpoint. They said today was a "good day," and that some are terrible, when they find themselves late for work or even losint the day's job. (Most travel in an organised way to their workplace, and their employers cannot wait if there are problems at the checkpoint.)
At around 7:15 the line became significantly shorter and we left.
On the way back we stopped to see what the situation was at the entrance to Issawiya, opposite the gas station on French Hill. We saw the presence of security forces, but no action.