Etzion DCO and CP, El Khadr, Biet Jalla

Bethlehem area, Wednesday PM, 5.1.05Observers: Daniella G., Tami B., Laura S., Maya BH (reporting)14:30. A very cold very wet day. To avoid the outdoors, we headed straight to the Ezyon DCO. It was as cold and wet inside the waiting room as outdoors. The ceiling leaks onto the plastic chairs, puddles on the floor. We met a group of people with a common story: They had been summoned to a meeting with the GSS at 9am that morning. They had been standing around since then. No place to sit (wet chairs), no place to eat, no busses come there, no public phones. Men of working age standing around bundled against the elements in their kafiyot, without a clue what's going on. Their papers were taken when they arrived, so they cannot even leave. And nobidy bothers to tell them when they will be seen. The upshot is that they were not. At 16:45, their papers were returned, along with new summons for February. The dates were different, but all were for Wednesdays. For some, this was not the first time they had been subjected to just that experience. Waiting around a whole day for a meeting that never takes place, no apologies or explanations offered. And yesterday was a particularly miserable day. It is heartbreaking how grateful they feel for our feeble, useless attempts to help. We cannot talk to the soldiers manning the windows, because they cannot, or so they pretend, hear us, and we are prevented from approaching them by the electriccaly operated carousel. We call here and there, and either nobody picks up the phone (02-9932881 is the number for the GSS in DCO Ezyon), or people do, and promise to look into it and get back to us (02-6704555 is the GSS Bethlehem switchboard), or when we got to the person actually named on the GSS summons, he was somewhere else, and didn't even know (so he claimed) that people were waiting for him at the DCO. "People"??? I guess not in the eyes of the GSS and the IDF. So yes, one person got his magnetic card today, after an 8 months wait and hiring a lawyer. But 7 others waited all day in vain, and 2 others were denied cards without explanation -- the usual. Being 4 of us, we could give a lift to only one guy, another trudged out of the closing DCO in the pouring rain, armed against it with a kefiya. As for the other places: Ezyon CP unmanned. Al Khader, relatively deserted, no army. Beit Jala CP, small line, advancing by the rules (show the right papers, and you can pass; everyone was showing them). Tunnel CP empty, traffic fast moving. Bethlehem CP 300 presented us with a surprise: We were allowed to approach the soldiers, and they talked back to us when we talked to them. How come? They had never heard of MW before, so they were not yet poisoned against us, that's how come ... There, too, not much traffic, the GSS container locked, little traffic, frozen soldiers in military "raincoats". How good it was to go back unhindered in our safe warm car to our safe warm homes.