Qalandiya - No queues are created at the entrance to the checkpoint

A Calm and Steady Morning

The problem of lines building up at the entrance to the Qalandiya checkpoint, which we and our colleagues have reported on the past weeks, did not exist this morning. The “traffic lights” above the three entrances to the checkpoint building remained green throughout our shift, and the flow inward was smooth and steady. From time to time people greeted us good morning or waved at us or simply smiled as they walked by, and no one approached us with a request for help with a permit that was confiscated or a permit request that was denied or any other problem. From a short conversation with the bagel seller, we were happy to learn that the problem of the lines had not returned recently, and the fact is that no one passing through approached us to comment about it.

Our passage through was also quick and easy. There is, however, a new procedure for those who do not have biometric permits: We were asked to pass our identity cards to the soldiers inside the glassed-in booth, through an opening for that purpose, and they were then inserted into a machine that apparently registers their details in a data base  (presumably noting our passage through the checkpoint). However, it seems that this works only with biometric IDs (or so we understood).  Although neither of us has one of these, our ID numbers were not typed into the system, as they had been in earlier years -- until one day the soldiers stopped recording our presence and simply waved us through, as though we were part of the scenery.