Etzion DCL, Sun 11.5.08, Afternoon

Place:

Etzion DCO

Observers:

Shlomit S, Yael S (reporting)

May-11-2008

Afternoon

Etzion DCL: We arrived at the DCL before 1500 hrs, and found a queue of nearly 30 Palestinian men and 1 woman. One of them told us that the day before he was sent home after 5pm “because we were not there” – and today, as Shlomit says, like a magic broomstick, our arrival opened the turnstile which had been closed for over 2 hours because of a problem with the DCL computers.

In the Etzion DCL there are only two positions for preparing magnetic cards, and the equipment suffers from many problems. In spite of repeated requests by the DCL for adding more positions and improving the equipment, they don’t receive any solutions but only ongoing maintenance. Two men were waiting to be interrogated by Captain X – according to them, since this morning. We tried to speed things up but to no avail. We also tried to help a man on the GSS restricted list to write a request to cancel his security restriction, but this also didn’t succeed. However, when we left after 1600 hours, there were less than 10 people waiting and men came out with magnetic cards which had been renewed. A Palestinian who came out asked us why the validity date wasn’t written on the card, and he was rather worried about this. However, when we examined the card we were able to reassure him that it was valid until May, 2010.

Tags: