At Tarkumiya it is even worse than Qalandiya
A Red Crescent ambulance was already parked at the designated spot and waited for its Palestinian counterpart.
They waited for a woman cancer-patient arriving from Ramallah, to bring her to the Augusta Victoria Hospital in East Jerusalem, the paramedic told us. I’ve known him for years.
We used the wait to talk about procedures of ambulance crossing at different checkpoints.
The worst is Tarqumieh - even if I’m sent there, I try to find someone else to replace me and not go, said my conversant, and explained that it’s because there, at the Tarqumieh Checkpoint, there’s a special conveyor belt where stretchers are placed with dead bodies, for a metal-detector inspection. This is done to Gazans who did not survive their treatment in the Hebron hospital and are sent to be buried at home, in the Gaza Strip.
Since that conversation I’ve been thinking about the person accompanying the ill and quietly, resignedly mourns this humiliating sight.
At Tarqumiya it’s the worst, he repeated. Even worse than Qalandiya (this notorious checkpoint).
As his words were still echoing, the ambulance arrived from Ramallah bearing a woman connected to an oxygen tank.
She has cancer of the chest, said the medical team.
The woman was accompanied by her adolescent daughter and son.
All the permits are okay, the medical team said, but the security inspection turned out not okay – the daughter has the necessary permit, but the son who relied on the work permit he holds, was not issued a permit to accompany his ill mother. He could be caught at the hospital and arrested as an illegal alien, and things could even get sticky for those who inspected the papers here at Qalandiya, said one of the guards.
The back-to-back procedure was halted, the ill woman remained unmoving on the stretcher, her children remained seated next to her in the Ramallah ambulance, the Jerusalem medical team and myself huddled together and about the logic behind letting someone work in Jerusalem when he is not allowed to help his mom in her illness. Embarrassment, phone calls followed, until the armed guard ruffled his feathers and announced that he had solved the problem, the son too has the proper permit.
The woman and her children went on to the other ambulance and drove off to Augusta Victoria, and I remained with the burden of information about the Tarqumieh proceedings.
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At the Qalandiya refugee camp front the air was filled with teargas fumes, seemingly unexplained, but within minutes the meaning arose with the appearance of five children armed with stones and empty glass bottles that were thrown at the vehicular checkpoint gates
. The provocation of the children - who averaged no more than 13 years of age – resulted in two armed guards coming out of the checkpoint, and at their sight the young combatants dispersed among the bushes on the hill. The armed guards returned to their own compound, the children returned, came downhill, renewed their stone assortment and repeated their actions.