Beit Iba

Beit Iba, Sunday 12 December 2004 PMObservers: Raya Y., Yehudit B., Noa P., Chen (a new watcher), Naomi L. (reporting) colour =red>14:40 – The place was swarming with people. In front of the checkpoint we saw a very large group of women students standing and waiting. They had come to the checkpoint by bus at 12:30 (according to the owner of the bus company), had gone through the inspection in the pedestrian lane and, since then, had been waiting for the bus which was stuck somewhere in a line of vehicles that was scarcely moving. The inspection of vehicles was being done very slowly, with special attention being paid to the cars coming on the fast line, to ambulances and to those superior beings travelling in private cars. The attitude seemed to be that everyone else could wait.Since the young women had been waiting for more than two hours, we turned to the checkpoint commander and asked that his men move along the line of trucks and let the bus through. To our surprise, he answered immediately, even asking, "What can I do to help you?" Within 15 minutes, the bus had passed. "And what about all the other buses?" asked the bus company owner, "They are killing us, it is impossible to work this way, every bus which enters and exits takes a whole day: it's destroying our livelihood."An elegantly dressed man who did not seem to us to be the "suspect" age, was waiting in the detention shed. [Detainees are, typically, men aged from 16 to 30 or 35 who have no passage permits; recently, young women, too, have been detained. There has also recently been a downward shift in the ages affected – now from 14 to 30 — but this can vary. 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 soldier had taken his documents, the man said, adding that he had no idea why. He was a lecturer at an-Najah University, and he had the appropriate permit. We turned to the officer who in turn took the ID papers from a soldier's pocket, gave them to the lecturer and sent him on his way. We couldn't find out why this man had been detained: his ID card hadn't even been submitted for inspection. There was a lot of movement through the checkpoint, the inspection was on the whole swift and the soldiers were pleasant.There were a few people in the detention " pen" : among them was a student who wanted to leave Nablus but was sent back since leaving Nablus without a permit is a "privilege" that can only be exercised by an-Najah University students on Wednesdays [they can return, under a similar dispensation, only on Saturdays]. 14:50 – We left for Huwwara with a bad feeling that the checkpoint at Beit Iba needs a full and continuous Machsomwatch presence from the time it opens until it closes, which has not happened for the past few weeks.