Hashmonaim (Ni'ilin), Makkabim (Beit Sira)

Na’alin CP

At about 05:30 we arrived at the Na’alin CP, named “The Hashmona’im Passage”. We passed the CP in the car and waited on the side of the road, some distance away. We crossed the road and stood near the place where people jump over the security fence and descent on the dirt road in the direction of the CP. Beyond the security fence, food stalls await then, as also down there, on the road from Na’alin.

There are queues at the entrance to the CP, around the square and in the direction of Na’alin. We chose a man dressed conspicuously in order to check how long it would take him to pass, and returned to the car. The woman checker at the CP greets us and insists that each one of us return the greeting (to be sure none is Arabic, God forbid.

After having passed the CP in the car, the chaos is great on the Israeli side, although it is less than on Sundays. We advance to the exit from the CP. At a certain stage they stopped the passage. People who had already passed the checking were forced to wait in front of the last turnstile which was closed. There was a security man on the spot. We couldn’t understand what had happened. After a few moments the turnstiles were reactivated and the passage was renewed as before.

In the meantime, a man who had been caught in Israel without a permit approached us. He has a permit only for Mevo Horon (a settlement). As he has passed without any problem it seems no police record had been opened for him, and he is not a person prevented by the police. We explained to him what he could do if it turned out that he is prevented by the police after all (that’s to say a police record had been opened for him).

It took “our" man a little over half an hour to pass, which relatively much for this CP. We thought for a moment that we must have missed him, or that he had taken off his colorful jacket which was our identifying mark… 

The Beit Sira CP

We returned to the cars and drove to the Beit Sira (Maccabim) CP. We parked along the road in the direction of Modi’in and left the car. The time was nearly 06:30. There were many cars along the roads, some in double parking, waiting for workers and many workers waiting for their transportation. Here too we picked out a man conspicuously dressed who arrived from the direction of Saffa and Beit U’r Altahta. It took him a bit over 10 minutes to pass. We left.