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Testimony of Wafa ‘Adnan
Hassan Faraj, 19, single, high school student, resident of Duha,
Bethlehem District
The testimony was given to Suha Zeyd at Faraj’s home on 3 July,
2002.
I am a high school
student in the academic track at the Bethlehem Girls School. The
school
is located on a-Saf
Street in downtown Bethlehem.
The matriculation exams were supposed to start on Monday, 17 June.
We took the first
exam, which was Arabic.
The next day, we took the second exam, which was the second
part of the Arabic exam.
On Thursday, the 20th, the Israeli army reinvaded Bethlehem and
imposed a curfew on the
area. As a result, we couldn’t leave our houses and take the third
exam, which was English.
The Maher television station broadcast an announcement by the
Ministry of Education
that the third exam had been postponed and would be held on
Saturday, the 22nd.
The television station broadcast that the curfew would be lifted on
Saturday from 9:00 A.M.
to 1:00 P.M. We went to
the Girls School. There was a great deal of confusion and many
students did not show
up. The exams did not arrive until 11:00 A.M. We started to take the
exam, which was supposed
to be three hours. The exam finished around 14:00 P.M. The
curfew started again
during the exam, and when we left the school, the streets were
empty.
We had to walk home,
which put us in a life-threatening situation. While we were walking
home, an armored Israeli
vehicle passed by. We were ten girls, residents of Duha. The
vehicle was about fifty
meters from us. It fired at us and we had to run and hide inside the
nearby houses. About
half an hour later, we continued on our way home. We were deathly
afraid that we would
come across another Israeli vehicle, so we did not use the main
road.
It took us about ninety
minutes to get home. My mother and brothers worried a lot because
I was late.
I started to study for the fifth exam. I was very tired and worried
about the marks I would get
on the exams. On Monday
[26 June], the day scheduled for the fifth exam, which was
mathematics, there was
no announcement that the curfew would be lifted. I was very
concerned. The Director
General of the Ministry of Education, Mr. Abdullah Shaqarneh,
asked the students
taking the exam to go to the school closest to their homes to take
the
exam. The other girls
from my area and I left home during the curfew. We were very
frightened, and were not
mentally prepared to take the exam. We walked about five
hundred meters to the
Alhulafa a-Rashdin School, in Duha. We waited in the schoolyard
until the exams arrived
from the Ministry of Education and until the teachers managed to
get to the school. Very
few pupils had arrived at the school. The atmosphere was very bad
and tiring. All the time
we worried that the soldiers would invade the rooms where we were
taking the exams,
because we heard that they had done that elsewhere in the West Bank.
During the exam, I cried
and had trouble concentrating. I was frightened. I was thinking
about how I would get
home under the curfew.
The exam ended at 3:00 P.M., and we started to walk home. This time,
we did not come
across any Israeli
vehicles. I arrived home tired and worn out. I felt sure that I
didn’t pass
the exam. I was supposed
to prepare for the second mathematics exam, which was to be
given on Thursday, the
27th. On that day, the curfew was lifted and we took the exam
without
any problems. The
seventh exam, on the religion of Islam, took place on Saturday, the
29th,
without any problem. On
Monday, the first of July, the biology exam was held without any
problems. On Wednesday
[3 July], we were supposed to take the physics exam, but the
curfew had not been
lifted. We didn’t hear any announcement by the director general of
the
Ministry of Education to
go to the nearby school. The exam had been postponed. The
postponement caused us
great problems. We have to prepare for the physics exam
tomorrow [4 July], and
we heard on television tat the curfew would be lifted tomorrow. That
will be the last exam.
We will have taken eight of the ten exams in very difficult
conditions
and in a poor emotional
state. We don’t know whether or not we did well.
Testimonies taken from
the Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.
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