Beit Iba

BEIT IBA, Wednesday 8 December 2004 AM Observers: Rina T., Natalya A., Bonnie R. (reporting)colour=red> 08:30 – 10:15 08:30 – We arrived at the checkpoint and found a long line of people waiting to go through to Nablus. It was a grey, rainy day and the atmosphere was not improved by the fact that the pleasant reservists had been replaced by regular soldiers. On the whole, these soldiers worked effectively although not as politely as the reservists. There were only a few detainees but, as usual, one taxi driver had been detained. [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 taxi driver told us that a soldier who'd been one of the crew in the Hummer jeep that had caught him had broken the side mirror of his taxi. The checkpoint commander was sceptical about this story, but other recent reports from Beit Iba have noted similar incidents, so the driver's version is probably accurate [there is a running feud between the checkpoint soldiers and the taxi drivers who try to pick up fares at the checkpoints].10:15 – The rain stopped , most of the detainees were sent on their way and we left the checkpoint.