The Baltimore Sun · 30 May 2010

CP-2010-032

Israel reopens W. Bank highway to Palestinians

But access to major road closed in ’02 after attacks doesn’t include main city

By Douglas Hamilton / REUTERS

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Transcribed from the clipping

ROUTE 443, WEST BANK — Israel on Friday began allowing Palestinians onto a major highway in the West Bank for the first time in eight years, but barred them from using it to gain easy access to their main city, Ramallah.

Just a few miles east of the new checkpoint where Palestinians are now allowed onto Route 443, big yellow road signs warn them to get off again, at the “last exit for Palestinian vehicles” to the West Bank’s commercial capital.

Around the bend, Israeli troops at a new three-lane checkpoint ensure that “only Israeli citizens and permit holders” may continue on to Jerusalem. Cut off before they can reach the fast route to Ramallah, the Palestinians must go back onto narrow country roads.

Palestinian access to 443, one of two main routes linking Israel’s coastal plain with the uplands of Jerusalem, was blocked in 2002 after several fatal shooting attacks on Israeli cars during the Palestinian intifada.

The level of violence has subsided significantly, and last December Israel’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Palestinian petition that highway segregation was illegal. It gave the Israel Defense Forces six months to end it.

Activists say the costly new arrangement is a disappointment to Palestinians and an irritant to Israelis who say they will not feel safe sharing this short section of the highway. Hailed at first as a victory for justice, the Supreme Court ruling now looks like a “human rights travesty,” the Association for Civil Rights in Israel said this week.

Palestinian villagers living near the route said the eight-year ban on using it had tripled their travel time to Ramallah, where there are jobs, hospitals, banks and government offices. They had to take narrow roads over the hills.

But they feel the new arrangement will be no better: They expect to use a mere 2½ miles of the road between Israel’s main westbound and eastbound checkpoints, and not even that if it proves faster to use existing tunnels under 443 rather than line up to be checked.

Farouk Antawi, a Palestinian driving from his village of Beit Sira, said on Israeli radio that Israeli and Palestinian vehicles share all the other main roads in the West Bank, “and there is no difference between them.”

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