Huwwara North

HUWWARA NORTH, Wednesday 1 December 2004 AM Observers: Tsila L., Hanna A. (reporting) colour=red>There were no unannounced checkpoints on the way to Huwwara. On the way back, at 11.30, there was a checkpoint at Jit. Apparently there's a general tendency to ease restrictions, although this isn't easy without coordination.09:05 – There was one detainee; at 10:30, when we left, there were three new detainees. In between, six detainees were held and released by 10:00. One of them said his wife had been injured in a traffic accident in Huwwara and had been rushed to hospital: he wanted to go home to Bita to collect medical insurance documents. He kept going out of the detainees' area and a soldier who had just arrived pushed him lightly back in, talking in a firm voice. His arrival disrupted the calm atmosphere.[Detainees are, typically, men aged from 16 to 30 or 35 who have no passage permits; recently, young women, too, have been detained. The detainees' ID details are phoned through to the General Security Services (GSS, also known as the Shabak or the Shin Bet, the Hebrew acronym for the GSS) for checking against a central list of security suspects and the answers are then relayed back to the checkpoints. This cumbersome process can take considerable time, and that can be prolonged even more if the soldiers wait to accumulate a batch of ID cards before passing them on to the GSS , or if they behave in a similarly tardy manner at the end of the process, waiting until they have a batch of GSS clearances before they release individual detainees. Meanwhile, the detainees are virtually prisoners at the checkpoint where the soldiers retain the ID cards until the entire process is completed]. The “virtual” line for taxi drivers [which had kept them at a "respectful" distance from the checkpoint – and therefore from their passengers] had disappeared and they were apparently now permitted to park near the checkpoint to the north.Apart from that, there were the usual incidents. An elderly woman, with an Israeli ID card , speaking Hebrew, who had been barred from entering Nablus, now wanted to leave. So how had she got into the town? The representative of the District Coordinating Office (DCO) [the army section that handles civilian matters; it generally has representatives at the checkpoints ostensibly to alleviate the lot of the Palestinians] noted down her details and tried to find out how she'd reached Nablus. He told her he'd have to report her details to the police and she wept. He told her not to come again and then explained to us that he had to threaten otherwise “they” would tell everyone it was possible to get through.A salesman of cellular phones was told to empty out all his merchandise on the concrete floor and then put all the phones back one by one. There was no-one in the women’s line. Until a woman soldier arrived at 10.00, one of the men soldiers had checked the few women there were. One woman was forgotten (literally) stuck in the turnstile [these are not simple turnstiles such as one finds in a subway station, but high , revolving gates made of steel bars: each segment is barely large enough to admit one average-sized person; there is virtually no room to spare for anything that person may be carrying , whether a child or a parcel; passage for pregnant women or for the elderly is extremely difficult and frightening].And, as usual, the soldiers claim that “they [i.e. the Palestinians] know”: for example, "they know" that the women’s line is meant exclusively for women. How can "they know" when there is no sign there. The assertion is that “they” pull the signs down and until new signs are brought, the checkpoint commander can do nothing.After some time, the woman soldier began to understand the situation and said she was going to put up signs for men and women for each line. When a man came to the women’s line, she tried to send him back, but when he told her that he and the woman he was accompanying were a married couple, she agreed to check him. She also showed initiative, and, whenever there were very few women, she allowed men to come through the women's line to shorten the waiting time.When we collected the members of the Beit Iba watch, one of the taxi drivers approached us and said that in the past month taxi drivers had not been required to obtain a permit to carry passengers from Bait Iba to Jenin through Shavei Shomron. But today, new soldiers had arrived and had demanded permits.We drove to Shavei Shomron and found that his report was true. The soldiers were adamant and would not allow a taxi carrying passengers on their way to a funeral to continue on its way. The driver lost income, and the passengers were forced to change taxis. We called the DCO. At 13.30, R., the local DCO chief, talked to T. and told her that the situation was known about and would be dealt with.