Hebron

10:30-14:30

Before we left this morning we had time to read this news in “Ha’aretz”:

“A car hit an IDF soldier at a position south of Hebron before dawn and injured him slightly.  Following the incident, IDF forces began searching the area to locate the vehicle involved.  The soldier was slightly injured in the leg and treated on-site.

The incident occurred when the suspicious vehicle hit the soldier who was outside the concrete guard post at the military position south of Hebron.  According to the army, the car was driving very fast and hit the soldier standing there.  The soldiers fired at the car which managed to escape.”

We investigated – it happened at Kvasim junction on Highway 60, below the pillbox.  The Palestinians say it wasn’t intentional, but a traffic accident.  A Palestinian policeman is standing there.  He was very polite to us and gave us tamarhindi to drink…

As they did last month, the soldiers again searched and took the security cameras…but they forgot to return the cameras they took last month and there were no photographs.

This is a photo of the shop at the junction whose camera wasn’t returned.  When we were there the soldiers had already left.

Hebron is quiet.  Pupils haven’t yet come home from school.  Classes end on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday at 13:00, and on Wednesday and Thursday at 12:00.

Soldiers at the Worshippers Route sit in the shade of a tree.  One of the Palestinians from the area says it’s quiet now and promises to let us know immediately if something happens.  We don’t wait for the children to get out of school; we don’t want to create an incident.

We stop at Bassam’s, who lives beneath Beit Hameriva  (Yoel and Muahidan from Yesh Din stop next to us and we all have coffee.  They took testimony from ‘Abed about the recent incident with French Jewish tourists).

Bassam shows us this document:

The roads next to Beit Hameriva have now been requisitioned by the army for security purposes.  Landowners may apply to the DCL to request compensation.

If the residents will actually be forbidden to drive or walk on the two roads that have been requisitioned, the neighborhoods will be cut off from each other even more.

The document was placed on the door of the mosque near Beit Hameriva.  An Israeli lawyer representing the Hebron municipality is negotiating the matter with the DCL.

Bassam also tells us of serious sewage problems on the road, and the Hebron municipality isn’t doing anything about them because of the endless coordination required with the Israeli army.

They feel somewhat abandoned by the municipal authorities.  It’s very difficult to live in the tangle of two bureaucracies – the occupation’s, on the one hand, and the normal, day-to-day on the other.