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Israel Opens Road 443 to Palestinians

The Israeli Supreme Court has ordered the Israeli army to allow Palestinians on Road 443.

The Israeli Army has been ordered by the Supreme Court to open a highway connecting Tel Aviv with Jerusalem to Palestinians.

The four-lane highway 443, connecting Jerusalem with the main cities on the costal plain, had been closed to Palestinians despite running through Palestinians areas in the West Bank.

“This is a landmark ruling, we are very happy,” Melanie Takefman, spokesperson with the Association for Civil Rights in Israel said, who together with residents of six Palestinian villages located along the route, petitioned the court in 2007 to have the ban lifted.

“It really changes the rules of the game,” she said. “It shows that such collective punishment in not acceptable.”

“It was illegal given the history, which stated that the road could only be built for the service of the local population,” Takefman said. “Because it’s occupied territory, Israel is not allowed to use the Palestinian resources for their own use and when the road was expanded earlier in the 1980’s some of the Palestinian residents, whose land was being expropriated to build the road, petitioned the court.”

“The court only accepted the building of the road because the army said they were doing it for the Palestinian population,” she said. “When the army prohibited all Palestinian traffic on the road that clearly went against the court’s initial ruling.”
  
“What happened in the second intifada was that the Palestinian organizations including Fatah turned on 443 because they knew of the massive traffic of Israelis there,” Brig. Gen (res.) Shalom Harari, Former Senior Advisor at the Israeli Ministry of Defense, told The Media Line. “It turned into a major target for shooting and stoning.”

According to a recent estimation some 40,000 vehicles use the road daily.

“443 came to a situation in which it was totally empty,” he added. “People were afraid to drive on it because there were shooter cells located on the hills around that started to shoot.”

“The first Israeli response was to put small bases with tanks to neutralize these cells that were shooting, stoning or throwing Molotov cocktails from the neighboring hills,” Harari said. “It was almost 100% effective.”

Two of these initial positions still remain along the road and have grown into fortressed military bases.

“Then they started something else from the neighboring villages,” he said. “Meaning that you drive in a car, you take out the rifle from the window and simply shoot at the car to your side. And that, if you ask me, is what brought the closure.”

Initially dirt barriers closed off the road but these later developed into concrete barriers and fences. Two tunnels were built under the road, which allowed Palestinians to reach the rest of the West Bank only at much lengthened distances.

Road 443 connects Jerusalem with the city of Modi’in and is considered a vital addition to the narrow Highway 1.