Qalandiya - a woman with metal in her leg detained at the CP
The medical-patients’ transport vehicle to Gaza was at the checkpoint as early as 1 p.m., he was notified to get there early. I joined him at 3 p.m. Together we waited for the patients. When the driver got impatient he called, and heard there was a delay. We waited on.
First a woman came out (in the photo), extremely upset. She came from Ramallah, where she lives, and was on her way to East Jerusalem to visit her daughter.
When she went through the metal detector, it bleeped because of the metal pins that were inserted in her leg in surgery.
“I have metal in my leg” she told the soldiers. Either they didn’t understand, or didn’t believe her, or both, and forced her to repeat the whole process. Again and again it bleeped. “I burst out crying”, said the woman. “My tears were running and they were laughing in my face. I am 67 years old. What, don’t they have a mother, to be laughing at an old woman like that?”
After the laughs they made her go into a room where she was locked for about an hour, at the end of which she was released to get on her way.
“Take a picture and tell about this”, she said. I did and I do.
The driver and I continued waiting until the children, women and men who had been waiting there since morning without any food or water were allowed to get on their way home to Gaza.
On the other side of the checkpoint, the track that leads pedestrians to the refugee camp is flooded with the remains of the weekend rains mixed with rubbish, which made me think – perhaps – to suggest to Nir Hasson (Haaretz reporter) to reflect the condition of people’s travel conditions there: he had worked a long time on a story that dealt with the traffic jams around Qalandiya and spoke with me about this more than once.
On my way back from there, at the checkpoint, a suspicion arose that this young woman has a knife in her bag. A thorough and intrusive inspection showed that a hairbrush was the source of this suspicion, and there’s nothing because there was nothing (as Netanyahu is often saying…).
There was nothing, too, as I photographed the young woman and the security guard and the bag, and was held up at the police station for over an hour…