It was only 4 a.m., and the cold was starting to get to me. We were halfway through a month of reserve duty in the Gaza Strip, and as usual, we were finishing off the night patrol at the Erez Junction, backing up the skeleton crew that was guarding this all-important entryway, over the Green Line into the soft belly of the Jewish population centers of Gush Dan.
The Erez army roadblock is manned 24/7 by Israeli soldiers whose responsibility is to prevent any attempted illegal entry into the Gush Dan area, which includes Tel Aviv. For fifteen years this roadblock has been a natural corridor for terrorists and suicide bombers, so this duty is taken very seriously.
The thousands of Arabs who passed through the Erez checkpoint every morning usually began lining up as early as 3 a.m. to wait for their turn to be checked and cleared in order to arrive at their jobs in factories, restaurants, hotels and businesses across the country. Once the Intifada started in 1988 resulting in more rigorous inspections, the small shift of reserve- duty soldiers manning the check post was simply not up to the task at hand. At any one time, there might be as many as ten thousand Arabs waiting their turn for inspection, which presented a substantial security risk for the men on duty. As such, the patrols in the area would all converge on the Erez checkpoint in an attempt to help field this assignment.
On this particular morning, we had been checking vehicles for about an hour when we noticed a Volkswagen minibus with darkened windows. There was never enough time to check every vehicle, so we did the best we could at assessing which vehicles might present a greater threat, often waving vehicles through after merely looking at the occupants