Number of Soldiers Present: Six
Soldiers Names, ID #’s, License Plate #’s, Etc:
Jeep # 669 509
Events Witnessed:
Barbed wire at checkpoint behind which Palestinians must stand while IDs are checked.
No car is allowed to pass, either on the way to Surda or on the way to Ramallah; only first aid (Red Crescent) vehicles and trucks of food are allowed to go through.
ID check takes 15 minutes per person (average). One guy was detained for 1 hour ˝ because his ID was suspected to be a fake one. A friend of the guy is sent back to the village in order to get the father’s ID for further check.
Pedestrians checked at random but a large number of men are actually controlled. According to the soldier, “all of them are potential suspects, so we check from the list that we have but we cannot check everybody as too many people are going through the checkpoint.”
Soldiers are civil to the Palestinians, even though the Palestinians are obliged to stand behind the barbed wires, which is more humiliating. Soldiers speak in Arabic most of the time. Soldiers obviously in a good mood (yelling “Good morning Vietnam” and taking the newspaper from Palestinians in order to have a look at the pictures of the checkpoint that were taken yesterday).