Under the supervision of an Israeli soldier clutching an M-16 assault rifle, Qassem Saleh begins his daily disrobing.
First, he lifts his bright orange shirt so the soldier can see there's no bomb strapped to his torso. Then, after passing through a metal floor-to-ceiling turnstile, he undoes his belt and hands it over for examination to a second soldier, along with his wallet, mobile phone and cigarettes.
The second soldier peruses his documents and asks his reason for travel. The answer is a simple one: Mr. Saleh goes through all this, not to board a plane or visit a prison, but so that he can go home to his family after a day's studies at An-Najah University in Nablus. It's a process Israel says is necessary for security, but one that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians consider their daily humiliation.
With a curt nod, Mr. Saleh's documents are returned and he is allowed to pass. The whole process takes an hour and half, turning what would normally be a 15-minute commute each way between An-Najah and his home in the nearby village of Beeta into an ordeal that often sucks up a quarter of his day.
"If a person was carrying anything [illegal] do you think he'd pass through here?" the 23-year-old media student said as he walked through a crowd of taxi drivers shouting offers of rides to the cities of Ramallah and Hebron to the south. "They just do this to humiliate us, to annoy us into leaving this country."
Tensions run high at the Hawara checkpoint - a long tunnel of cement blocks and metal fencing covered by a tin roof - among the most notorious of the more than 500 permanent and temporary roadblocks set up by the Israeli army inside the West Bank. Along with two others, it cuts off the 177,000 residents of Nablus from the rest of the West Bank.
Few cars are allowed to pass Hawara, and there are three more checkpoints before a Palestinian from Nablus could reach East Jerusalem, ordinarily an hour's drive to the south. Depending on Israel's interpretation of the security situations, any of the checkpoints can be closed for hours or days at a time. Israeli traffic, meanwhile, flows freely to and from the nearby Jewish settlements of Bracha and Yitzhar along roads Palestinians are barred from using.
A report released last week by the International Committee for the Red Cross singled out the checkpoints and the isolation of Nablus as key parts of a system that denies Palestinians "normal and dignified lives." The broad rebuke of Israel for its 40-year-old occupation of the West Bank was surprising from an organization that makes an effort to remain neutral.
Another report, commissioned by the Israeli military, found such places are rife with physical and verbal abuse, as well as humiliations, gratuitous delays and bribe-taking.
Removing some of the checkpoints that carve the West Bank up into disconnected pieces is a key demand of the Palestinian negotiators taking part in peace talks with Israel, which restarted last week after a near seven-year lull. Speaking at a donors' conference in Paris yesterday, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas called for all checkpoints and roadblocks to be lifted so that Palestinians could have freedom of movement and trade inside the West Bank.
Though Hawara separates Palestinian cities, rather than Palestinians from reaching Israel, the Israeli military says the post is necessary for security. According to the Israeli military, soldiers at the checkpoint have prevented the smuggling of 31 explosive devices and 27 other weapons so far this year. Those numbers are the highest of any checkpoint in the West Bank.
Lieutenant Nir Balzam, commander of the Israeli military unit overseeing Hawara last week, said that roughly 25,000 people a day pass through Hawara via one or two "fast" lines for women and children and three longer lines for men.
He acknowledged frequent friction between the Palestinians and his troops, but defended the measures taken as necessary because of the violent militant groups inside Nablus. "Nablus is the capital of terror in the West Bank, so this is one of the most dangerous checkpoints in the West Bank," Lt. Balzam said as he watched perhaps 100 Palestinians wait in four long lines on a sunny afternoon last week. Many were carrying large bags - gifts bought ahead of this week's Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha - that were put through a portable X-ray machine mounted on a white Chevrolet truck.
