Word: checkpoints
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...clock is chaos at Rafah Crossing, the Egyptian-controlled entrance to the Gaza Strip. Black-clad Egyptian security forces stand by their trucks, ready if things get out of hand. Aid convoys line up in front of the main gate. Hundreds of Palestinians have already massed before the first checkpoint, yelling at border security in their effort to push through. Off to one side, a group of travelers tries to revive a sick woman who has lost consciousness. Egyptian security look on. Tempers are mounting. This is Day One of a rare three-day border opening...
...cards. All were born in Gaza, but some had been away for a decade or more. They carried Swiss, German, Spanish, and Australian passports. "No Palestinian ID card, no entry," a border guard shouted back at a Spanish-Palestinian couple who had been pulled off a bus at the checkpoint while their luggage continued on to Gaza. Last year, the couple said they had tried to enter the territory through Erez. They made it into Israel, but were denied entry to Gaza. "I don't want to move back to Gaza," says Mariam Khalil El Frani, 62, who has lived...
Getting through Rafah ultimately feels like a tremendous feat. Once on the other side, the bus pulls away from the Egyptian customs terminal, past Egyptian tanks, and into no-man's land before a sign welcomes you to Palestine. As the bus moved through the checkpoint, the Palestinians who had made it in began to applaud. They cheered and thanked God; others called relatives on their mobile phones. It was an emotional moment, yet paradoxical all the same, given that many might never be able to get back...
...thing. It's easy to run Brown down, because his writing isn't very deft. He introduces new characters with a kind of electric breathlessness that borders on the inadvertently hilarious ("Newly hired security guard Alfonso Nuñez carefully studied the male visitor now approaching his checkpoint ..."). And the unfortunate sentence "His massive sex organ bore the tattooed symbols of his destiny" should itself be forcibly tattooed on Brown's massive sex organ. Worse, Brown's scholarship reads like the work of a man who believes what he reads in Wikipedia. In particular, the book suffers from...
...rumors of people bribing soldiers to get them across the border and though the risks of crossing illegally are high, people still try. On July 31, a Georgian man was killed and his family members wounded when he drove their car over a mine while trying to bypass a checkpoint to get from Georgia into the South Ossetian-controlled village of Akhalgori. (See pictures of the Russians in Ossetia...