Morning

MachsomWatchers: MZ, OMA wet, rainy day with few people in the streets.At the pishpash [pedestrians' roadside passageway]: people crossing, a jeep with Military Police checking those crossing, but we saw no one turned back or held for questioning.A soldier was stationed at the look-out point above the gas station, watching the wall. Alongside the gas station, soldiers stopped passers-by and checked their IDs.A young woman, and the man with her, were stopped and not permitted to proceed on their way but were sent back to the east side of the wall. According to the soldiers, the couple had lied and seemed suspect to them.The soldiers claimed they had allowed others to proceed even though they had no permits.Sawahre checkpoint:When we reached the checkpoint there were some five vehicles (taxis and vans) whose drivers said they had been held up for over an hour. (A policeman at the checkpoint: "No one is held up here for more than 20 minutes, and if it happens that they are, then it's because of problems with the Shin Bet [G.S.S.; Security Service] computer terminal.") All were released a few minutes after our arrival. The soldiers refused permission for an Israel citizen, a resident of Ramallah, to go to Bethlehem. The man had an Israeli ID card in which his birthplace was listed as Ramallah (there was no attachment to the ID attesting to his place of residence, just the ID card itself), but he claimed to be a Ramallah resident with an office in Bethlehem. He said that he usually uses Checkpoint 300 at Gilo, but on Friday he had with him a Palestinian employee from the Occupied Territories, and at the Gilo checkpoint he had been told to use Sawahre. But here he was being refused on the grounds that Israeli citizens may not enter Area A of the Palestinian Authority.The soldier at the checkpoint claimed he had an order from a general to this effect and there was no possibility of letting the man through. It was to no avail that we tried persuading him that in any case, the man lived in Ramallah , and Watcher MZ's long telephone conversation with the IDF Humanitarian Center of the DCO was equally fruitless as was a long conversation (argument?) between the soldier himself and that office.Another man sought our help: He was driving a van from Hebron and wanted to go to Abu Dis. He had been refused on the grounds that had no permit for the vehicle. He claimed that commercial vehicles did not need permits, and that he had come this way every day and never had any trouble.The rather confusing explanation that we received from the DCO seemed to indicate that if the man had come from Hebron, then he had to have passed through an area in which he should have been in possession of a permit and therefore the fact that he had no permit meant that he had somewhere along the line circumvented a checkpoint!There was nothing we could do to help him.In short, a lot of rain and very little logic.