Suddenly, from my vantage point on a rock above, I noticed one Israeli sergeant running around the side of the students and attempted to grab a student, standing four people back from the row that was face-to-face with the soldiers. The sergeant failed to catch hold of him and called three soldiers over, as students shouted in surprise. Pointing out the student, by now safely moving further into the center of the crowd, the sergeant sent the three soldiers charging into the shocked students, smashing them out of the way.
Most students and faculty tried to run on the slippery ground, while others pushed and kicked back the Israeli soldiers, who responded with increased brutality, attacking anything that moved, oblivious to those who were being crushed underfoot by those running in panic.
In the picture above, note the lecturer in gray (left) primally clutching his genitals in self-protection. Also, the female student wearing pink trying to get up off the ground. Just in front of her, a soldier has seen a magazine full of bullets on the ground that one of his collegues has dropped, and is stooping to pick it up. Quite an amazing frozen moment.
It was the most senseless escalation of violence I had seen at any of the previous demonstrations. It seemed like it an oppotunity for the soldiers to release some of their anger from the recent attacks in Israel. Once again, those not responsible were the ones on the receiving end. Even after it had calmed down, one Israeli soldier had to be repeatedly restrained by his colleagues to prevent him running into the students and clubbing them.
"This is more like it," said the Reuters photographer, snapping away.
By this time, there were people on both sides of the checkpoint (right) - only a few hundred meters apart - including therefore the area supposedly under curfew, to give you some idea of how stupid this was. The soldiers were not preventing those on the Birzeit side of the checkpoint from travelling towards the "closed military area".
The checkpoint opened about 11:00am and the tour bus picked up about thirty students on the way. On arriving at the gates, I found another tour bus of around thirty people that had just arrived. I had not been expecting either group and there was no one else in the office to help.
Together with a student, Nasser Hidmi, I combined the two groups and gave the sixty a lecture on the recent events and the Oslo 2 legacy, followed by a campus tour. All in all it had been an amazing day for the choir who expressed great excitement at everything, and the other group - also Swedes, this time from Upsalla University, also reported benefitting from the living example of the continued post-Oslo human rights violations.
It was only after they both left that I heard the news from Cathi in our office about the reason for the curfew.