Shooting and checkponits in West Bank

international | anti-war / imperialism | news report Saturday October 04, 2003 11:59 by Aron baker_aron at hotmail dot com Balata, West Bank 087 2895036

Todays news from Nablus

Events from Sat 4th Oct. A shooting in Balata camp in Nablus and general humiliation and detentions, by IOF soldiers, of civilians.

Nablus
Sat 4th Oct
ISMers went to monitor Beit Furik checkpoint this morning at 7am and where unsurprised to find approx 200 people queueing to get to Nablus or out of Nablus, this checkpoint is were the majority of the teachers and students
attempt to pass. The various soldiers were standing around doing virtually nothing. I saw atleast 8 or 10 soldiers hanging around. Most of
the time only one person would check any IDs occasionaly another would do 1 or 2 Their biggest complaint and the reason they gave for not checking IDs was that people weren't queueing properly. People must wait about
50-60 metres back from the checkpoint, and all the people are already seperated in male and female queues, but they're not in perfectly straight lines. After monitoring for about an hour there was no significat change,
people exiting the city would queue for maybe 2 hours or more, people attempting to enter Nablus seemed to be waiting much longer, only about a
dozen people where let through into Nablus, in the hour we were there. A quad bike with two soldiers was riding around rounding people up like animals if they attempted to walk directly from village to city via the fields or whatever, about 10 people were brought to the checkpoint and were being detained for this offence, the soldiers unable to comprehand peoples reluctance to wait in line for 4 hours to go to school or work. We watched as the quad approached the checkpoint and rather than open the
gate the quad headed straight for the mens queue, forcing them to scrabble
and jump out of the way.
Only one vehicle attempted to exit the city at this checkpoint, a car with supplies, the result of this was for the couple of soldiers who were doing anything stopped what they were at until the taxi was checked fully, taking 20 minutes, resulting in nearly no one getting through for this period.
Leaving the checkpoint to return to Nablus to do other work, we hopped into a service taxi and headed back into Nablus, after 300 yards, around the first corner there was another checkpoint, a roving checkpoint. Two
jeeps were parked in the road stopping all vehicles, including the taxis carrying the people who had made it through the checkponit of Beit Furik.
After waiting 20 minutes we gave up waiting and having the privilege of international status we got out and walked through the checkpoint,
enquiring why they were stopping all these people who have either just spent hours coming through Beit Furik or are going to spend hours
queueing to go through. The soldiers, teenagers with guns from Israel have no comprehension or simply don't care about the effects on peoples lives and I'm sure many of them understand that what they are doing has nothing to do with security, only the humilation and crushing of an entire nation.
On our eventual return to Balata camp at 9:30am we were informed that shortly after 7 am soldiers approached the entrance to the camp in 2 jeeps and shot and wounded 1 man, he wasn't a targetted individual, just someone who was at the market there. The jeeps passed us about 300m from where they shot this man as we travelled to the checkpoint, we're told there was no provocation and no return fire.
Aron