CPTnet
8 September 2005

HEBRON: Continuing settler harassment, security measures, and cultural fears
mar the start of school in Hebron

 by Jerry Levin

Settler harassment and violently erratic police and army behavior have
marked the new school year in Hebron. Qurtuba Girls School teachers in Tel
Rumeida, including four who are pregnant, were obliged to run through a
gauntlet of stone and egg throwing settlers as they prepared to open the
school. Internationals contacted slow-to-react soldiers and police, who
later agreed to be present when school starts and ends each day.

Just before opening day, the army replaced a cylindrical metal sentry box
at the Dubboya Street checkpoint with a much larger prefabricated
trailer-like construction that completely blocks the street with
sophisticated electronic metal-sensing equipment installed inside. Another
of these structures has been positioned across a street leading to Ibrahimi
Boys School and Al Fayhaa Girls School at the other end of Shuhada Street.
Soldier operators inside the trailers (called "caravans") order students to
unload the contents of their backpacks into a tray for closer scrutiny.

During the first four days of school, the approximately two hundred women
and girls of Al Fayhaa School passed one-by-one through the electronic
security check. They felt apprehensively about doing so because they had
heard--erroneously --that the detection equipment includes x-rays capable of
violating feminine modesty. Then, still worried on Wednesday morning
September 7, they gathered en masse outside the security caravan. Their
spokesperson, a teacher, asked the soldier on duty to open a path through an
adjacent plastic barricade so that everyone could pass through at once
rather than singly and slowly through the worrisome electronic security
device. After checking with his commander by phone, the soldier said,
"Yes," but added that each morning a teacher would have to ask for
permission to enter in this manner.

 Meanwhile, Border Police at Gate Six leading from the Old City to Ibrahimi
Mosque, have routinely detained the principal and teachers at the boys'
school as well as senior high school students on the way to their
school--making them all late to their jobs and classroom studies. The first
day of school, Saturday 3 September, soldiers detained and beat one of the
older boys on his way home after school.

All of these incidents have taken place despite a high-ranking district army
officer's professed concern to CPTer Christina Gibb that incidents described
above should not be happening.