Qalandiya
It began with an uproar at the vehicle checkpoint, knots of people and shouting whose echoes were audible from afar but it was impossible to know what was happening.
When calm had returned Rushko, the police officer, appeared leading a Palestinian youth to jail.
Who is he, why was he arrested – we don’t know.
Then patients from Gaza who had been released from hospital this morning emerged from the DCL office, accompanied by an armed representative of the Civil Administration
. There were fifteen of them. Women, men, elderly and children. They were counted, it was ascertained none were missing, their documents were taken, their many belongings were loaded into the baggage compartment, they were ordered to get on the vehicle and be seated, were counted again and checked to ensure no one was missing or had fled, because the authorities’ greatest fear with respect to Gaza residents is that someone might escape, as has happened. Not very often, but still… They’re liable to….what? Actually, it’s not clear what.
Only when it was certain that the bureaucracy had overcome all obstacles did the vehicle transporting them begin its journey.
The boy in the photo wanted his picture taken. His mother also wanted him to be photographed.
She asked him to remove his hat. He refused. He didn’t want anyone to see the treatments had left him bald.
After the Gazans had left an ambulance arrived from Jerusalem with a cancer patient who’d been treated at Hadassah and had been sent home to Ramallah. The ambulance and the patient waited a long time for the arrival of an ambulance from Palestine.
As time passed we began hearing rumors, and Border Police soldiers started arriving.
They said something had happened in the Old City, there are problems at Nablus Gate, they’re searching for someone who’d fled from there and that’s why all the entrances to Palestine have been closed, and because all the roads are blocked the ambulance is also delayed.
Somehow the ambulance managed to get through the traffic jams, arrived and picked up the patient. But the many people who’d gathered at the close of their work day, wanting to return to their homes on the West Bank, confronted locked revolving gates and a line of police officers and Border Police soldiers and security guards armed with rifles and grenades who blocked the road.
We stood, hundreds of people facing them, a crowded, tightly-packed mass, waiting for the storm to blow over and the road to Palestine reopen. A few more minutes, replied the guard I asked how long it would take, but the “few more minutes” lasted almost an hour.
Finally, when darkness had already fallen, two more pairs of ambulances arrived, a woman with cancer and a man also with cancer who were moved from one stretcher to another and from West Bank ambulances to those from Jerusalem.