ISRAEL partly reopened a main road in the West Bank town Hebron to limited Palestinian traffic yesterday for the first time since a 1994 massacre of Arabs a Jewish settler.
A US brokered peace deal paved the way for Palestinian ambulances, taxis and municipal vehicles to travel along a section of Shuhada, or Martyrs, street again - albeit in only one direction.
Cars with Israeli licence plates had free run of the road, up and down a heavily guarded hilly stretch bordering a Muslim cemetery in an area of Hebron still under Israeli control.
Hours after the reopening, journalists and Israeli soldiers outnumbered vehicles plying the route that begins at an outdoor market and ends at a "no entry" sign which Israeli authorities placed at a turn off to a Jewish seminary.
Israeli and Palestinian workers cleared roadblocks on Sunday night, but the more formidable barrier of mistrust remained.
"It is a new reality, a problematic reality," a settler spokesman, Mr Noam Arnon, told Israel Television minutes before the opening. "It will be flooded with Arab cars, which will pose a real danger to the Jews here."
For some Palestinian taxi drivers, it was only more of the same in the volatile town where some 400 Jewish settlers live or study amid more than 100,000 Arabs.
Israeli policemen, wearing flak jackets and carrying assault rifles, banned Palestinian taxis from parking outside newly reopened taxi offices, saying permission had yet to be granted by Israeli military authorities.
"He can park here but he won't have a car left," one police officer said to another, pointing at a taxi driver. "They know the rules."
Israeli authorities said the street, closed to Palestinian vehicles since a Jewish settler massacred 29 Arab worshippers at allbrahimi mosque in February 1994, would reopen in stages over a four month period.
Hebron's Palestinian mayor, Mr Mustafa al Natsheh, demanded Israel step up the pace.