Qalandiya - burning tyres
“Motherfuckers, they’re burning tires” the policeman in charge of the vehicle checkpoint answered my question about the black smoke rising from the other – the Palestinian – side of the wall.
I hurried over to the smoky side, the injured side, the side that also bleeds from time to time.
Up the hill next to the wall crowded many children by a pile of tires.
Every few minutes they burnt a tire and rolled it down the hill towards the pillbox post, one ring of fire after another.
The sky was covered in thick black smoke that mixed with the fumes of the teargas shot there yesterday.
“There was a chaos here yesterday, lots of shooting” said a resident of the refugee camp.
Yesterday, a teargas grenade smashed the glass windshield of Ahmad’s cart, the cart that is his livelihood, a cart three of whose sides are glass and in which he fries falafel balls.
Until the cart is fixed – no falafel, no livelihood for Ahmad.
The road between Qalandiya and Hizma crosses Jab’a Checkpoint. In the spirit of these evil days there is plenty to report about the soldiers stationed there. For reasons I have specified in the past, I skip over to direct reporting from Hizma village.
“There’s no army here today”, these were the words of a Hizma villager who welcomed me. “On Friday they were here, and there were arrests. But not today.”
As a warning sign of what might happen and a reminder of what already has, the army has placed a concrete barrier in the middle of the eastern entry road to the village.
