The pushing started at 05:00 this morning. Not half and hour after the terminal in the walled city of Qalqiliya opened, 500 Palestinians rushed the single turnstile gate. The women simply moved out of the way, the old men ducked, and I got behind a cement block as the heaving mass tumbled towards me. I was hoping that today would be better than the previous time I came to this West Bank city’s border into Israel. People line up here from before 04:00 and wait patiently but this morning the opening was delayed by 30 minutes. The line stretched back almost 100 meters; perhaps a thousand people were backed up, getting restless. Yes, I thought, this morning is going to be a bad one. The terminal was opened with a gruff ‘Boker tov’ over the Israeli loudspeakers and the first people started ticking through. Ok, so they are running a little late, soldiers are human too, but then the flow was cut off again and the people backed up again, the people got restless again. Repeatedly. As those near the food stalls about 80 metres back from the gate started shoving, those closer to the front wanted them to calm down. “La la,” they said, “La la”. No, no, keep calm. That was successful for about 5 minutes and then from 05:00 there was no calm. The gate was rushed.
All gates were closed now as often happens when the gate is rushed. Four soldiers came to the gate yelling to all to step back, to calm down, stop climbing on people. No easy task to calm a justifiably angry mob. But they do. Once calm, they opened the gates for a minute, then closed, then another minute, then closed. I still am not sure what the reason was for these delays that morning but if you want to keep people calm, you don’t want to give them a reason not to be. Of course, the gate was rushed again.
In my opinion – treating people like this is like burning someone at the stake while expecting them to be quiet about it. When they squirm and scream it seems the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) fan the flames thinking that’s going to shut them up. It is this kind of mentality that is such a frustration as I observe this conflict
Have a look at the below video taken by my self from You Tube.
