Ar-Ram, Qalandiya
With two ambulances, two stretchers and many hands a cancer patient from the West Bank was transferred to the other side of the Qalandiya checkpoint on her way to be treated at Augusta Victoria hospital in East Jerusalem.
Shortly afterwards a cancer patient from the West Bank who’s being treated at Makassed hospital in East Jerusalem arrived on his way to an MRI. But none of the six Palestinian hospitals in East Jerusalem have an MRI facility (a fact I hadn’t known until that minute), and the man, who looked like he wouldn’t last a day, should have gone to Ramallah where there is an MRI machine. The semiconscious patient was shifted around and driven away, and if he survives will be driven back, shifted around again, and again be brought to hospital in East Jerusalem.
The town of A-Ram is a seismograph for events in Jerusalem.
The youths there are exposed, they hold rocks and broken glass, and they’re filled with rage. A great deal of rage.
The army responded by invading and surrounding and firing and took control of public space and private territory and stopped vehicle traffic and blocked main roads.
And all afternoon the town center was deserted of residents who sat besieged in their homes.
Farther away, in the pillbox above Jaba village, stood a group of soldiers from the Giv’ati brigade who weren’t happy with the presence of uninvited visitors (=us), and when we began moving away fired a tear gas grenade at us that missed the vehicle by less than half a meter.
The thunder of the exploding grenade shook the care (and me also) and a cloud of thick, white smoke spread in the air.
Tell me something I don’t know about the IDF’s ethical code, about the unbearable lightness of its trigger finger, or about changes in the rules for opening fire.