Press Room

Ramallah, Aug. 22 (Apcom) – The city is animated, live and colorful. While in Gaza and in the South of Lebanon the battles get stronger, in the streets of the centre of Ramallah, you could actually breath an almost-normal atmosphere, the market stools full of fruit and vegetables, veiled women, girls wearing western clothes, boys hanging around waiting for the day to pass by, keeping company to the many invalids, some very young, who sit in the sun. The shops are open, full, and the daily life makes its course, with no apparent disturbances. In the streets of the main city of the West Bank, slightly less than 60,000 inhabitants, at 10 kilometers from the Israeli capital, an indefinite number of cabs wait, yellow and shining, for a few shekels they will go back and forth towards Jerusalem and increase the city traffic, already busy enough, here and there you could also see a very large car too. “Many Palestinians who live abroad, in the USA or in the Persian Gulf, have their summer residence here and they come over for the holidays.” explains a young German woman who works here.

Slightly further up the hill, you can reach the Muqata, the Head Quarter of the Anp, where Yasser Arafat is buried. The walls are covered with images of the former leader, died in November 2004 in Paris, and his grave, a large cubic structure in cement, is partially hidden behind a gigantic photo of his face and by the image of the grave itself, which creates a weird perspective effect. Here, like in the streets of the city, the few westerners are not looked at with distrust, at the Muqata the guards let the rare curious people go in, merely asking them a question or two about their nationality.

In the air the continuous buzz, not the one – quite frequent in these areas – of the planes, but of the cranes, of the trucks and the cement mixers that proceed with the intense construction work in the city. Lots of buildings are being built also on the way to Atarot, the checkpoint to Jerusalem. There the cabs stop and turn back, while the trucks and the private cars, stop and wait in line to be checked. The pedestrians, after having crossed the large square, reach the corridors with the metal detectors. There, the tense atmosphere of these latest days is extremely felt.

At 5pm there are lots of people, more than what the Israeli staff can handle. The open passage is only one, and five minutes are enough for fifty people to crowd it, mainly older women with young children. Some of them manage to get through, and then the speaker explains in Arabic that they need to move to another passage, arising protests from those who thought they were going to soon cross, but find themselves now last in line. On the other side of the thick metal grate, two female soldiers, not even twenty years old, armed and goofy in their too heavy uniform, do not give in to the sweet-talking of two young Palestinian men, who invite them to have coffee in exchange of a preferential treatment.

An older colleague interferes, the two young men decide to join the queue like all the others. But the new passage does not work, there are technical problems, it is already half hour that the people wait and the line grows excessively. The young women tend to give in to the situation more easily, some of the older women complain loudly, the soldiers do not answer and do not give any explanations.

It takes more than an hour for the line to thin out. “It has been like this lately, usually the checks take a few minutes, but in this period this is how it is, we have to take it easy”, a young woman tells us. The Arabs are kept longer, showing their documents, while the very few westerners go through within less than a minute, with their bags quickly scanned with the metal detectors and their passports, which nobody looks at, in their hands. An older man approaches the glass behind which sits a male soldier, very young, tries to protest, asks for explanations for the rude treatment. The discussion rises, until the man leaves, takes his son’s hand and walks away, saying in English: “I agree with them that these checks have to be made. They have all the rights to defend themselves, but they do not have any right to treat us inhumanely”.