Monday, June 3. Monique Simard and I watched from atop a hill. At first, the scene was not so strange: the tear gas, the people running away and back again. It was a little like the scene at the fence in Quebec City last April.
But here there was one difference. When the shooting began, no one knew if the soldiers were shooting real bullets.
For most of the afternoon, checkpoints on the road linking Jerusalem and Ramallah had remained closed. Palestinians working in Jerusalem and living in Ramallah couldn’t get home. Frustration grew as the afternoon wore on. A few walked forward to speak or argue with the guards.
Travelling with a French delegation, we had entered Ramallah hours earlier for meetings. But the checkpoints closed after the morning commuter rush. As evening approached, a crowd of several hundred Palestinians still waited to re-enter the city.
Soldiers shot tear gas to disperse them. A few young boys who I had seen earlier gathering rocks started throwing them at the soldiers.
That’s when the soldiers started shooting. People ran in all directions.
As we had been instructed, we walked slowly away.
“Come, come,” one man yelled. He waved us to take refuge from the bulletsbehind a car parked nearby.
As extraordinary as the experience was for us, here it is a daily ritual. Earlier in the afternoon, we watched Israeli soldiers drive their tanks back and forth, scattering people waiting to cross another checkpoint.
There seemed to be no clear reason for either incident.
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