Morning

There was a steady flow of people jumping over the wall, slightly to the left of where the road is blocked with the “cement blocks” – there was no presence of the border police most of the time, and when a jeep appeared, we did not see them asking for identification. As reported on Wednesday, the area behind the wall had been dug out, making the wall higher on that side. A pile of stones has been put on the Jerusalem side of the wall, at a place where the bulldozer has not (yet?) done the digging. The transit drivers told us that the army will soon make that wall higher with oil drums filled with concrete.The gate of the mosque has been reported to be locked since Wednesday, and the end of the passage to the university, between the ‘cement blocks’ and the wall of the mosque is now blocked with large cubic blocks of concrete. We saw several older women climb over those blocks with great difficulty. Up at the “Parliament” building, there was a border police jeep, that seemed to be waiting in the yard. Up on the hill on the other side, we spoke with two Palestinian men who were standing behind a tall metal gate and who invited us in to see their situation. The residents of this rather well-to-do section had been pressured to build gates (at their own expense) at the end of two streets (actually driveways), to stop people from passing through, otherwise the army would block their entrances completely with concrete blocks. In other words, as with the transit drivers, the local population is being forced to do the policing. Not only did they have to build those locked gates, but they had to make the fences and walls between their yards higher, often using barbed wire. We spoke with four transit drivers whose vehicles have recently been confiscated because they were caught driving people from the territories and wrote down all the relevant information.