Huwwara

Huwwara, Monday 20 December 2004 AM Annelien K., Orly P., Tal H. (reporting) colour=red>At the Tapuah-Za'tara junction, 20 cars had been stopped and were awaiting checking.We arrived at Huwwara South at 10:00 to find the market stands and the taxi park teeming with life. There was no line at the checking stations and people were passing, freely for the most part, to the left of the turnstiles. In the detainees’ "pen", four people were waiting for their ID cards to be returned to them (one of the soldiers explained that these detainees had been picked out of the general public quite at random). [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.] D., the checkpoint commander, was very calm and courteous, and in the light of what we are used to seeing here, he surprised us by firmly reminding the soldier guarding the detainees that he should not eat in front of them.At Huwwara North we found a similar situation, though people here were going through the turnstiles, but there was no queue forming and no tension. A military policewoman was giving a noisy display of her group's habitual vulgarity. While we were there, the Samaria Area Commander arrived for a visit (our Machsomwatch colleagues have met with him several times). He patiently listened to our complaints and observations (nothing new in any of them) and gave us in reply the usual senior army echelons' rhetoric. In the (relatively) free atmosphere that characterized this checkpoint this morning, and with the many Palestinians hurrying on about their business without the Israeli soldiers being galvanized into donning helmets or suddenly aiming their weapons, the checkpoint scene was even more surreal than usual. But until this whole nightmare is over, may such moments of grace exceed the others that we are all too used to seeing.Finally we drove around to Beit Furiq which was quiet and empty (this was the "dead" mid-morning hour).