Beit Iba, Jit, Qalqiliya, Tue 16.10.07, Afternoon

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Observers: 
Yael S., Amit Y
Oct-16-2007
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Afternoon

 12:45, Qalqiliya: 3 cars waiting in line to leave the city; one waiting at the entrance.

13:30, Jit: a special roadblock because of terror alerts, the soldiers tell us. But they don't check any of the cars that are passing through...

14:10, Beit Iba: When we arrive we find two detainee; one is there since 10 AM, the other - handcuffed and blindfolded - since 7 AM. The roadblock commander refuses to talk with us. He's busy micro-managing pedestrian passage through the carousels: "two from the right" he shouts to the soldier in the booth who then clicks the operation button twice; then, "three from the left," the commander continues and the soldiers obeys. That's how the officer spends most of his time during the hour and a half we are there. He further perfects the order by having added a new regulation: women for checkups are to form a queue on the left, men on the right.

We call the Humanitarian Center about the detaineesinfo-icon. As usual, they promise to check and call us back. After about 30 minutes we still haven't heard from them, so we call again. They tell us that the detainee from 10:00 AM is waiting for a doctor to come and check him before he is taken in for interrogation. It seemed that the Center confused the 2 detainees; the guy is a cab driver currently being punished for having crossed some line that the commander directed cabs not to cross. We ask the Center to check the matter again; again they promise to call us back, and again they don't. Thus we go back and forth... At 17:30 we ring the Center for the last time; we already talked with the cab driver who told us he was released at 16:00 with no doctor arriving or interrogation happening, but at the center they still don't know anything - they still haven't managed to figure out why a man has been forced to waste 6 hours of his day in detention.

At the cars' check point there's a very long wait on the way out from Nablus; 3 hours, a cab driver tells us. All small cars go through extremely thorough and long check up - every bag in the trunk is taken out and investigated. Commercial cars, on the other hand, aren't checked at all.