Israel opened on Friday a key highway across the West Bank to Palestinians, which had been closed off to Palestinian traffic in 2002 following a series of shooting attacks on Israeli vehicles.

Israel Defense Forces (IDF) opened the Route 443 to Palestinian vehicles at 8 a.m. (0500 GMT) Friday morning, an IDF spokesman told Xinhua.

While the Palestinians are now able to use the road to reach some of the villages alongside it, access to Ramallah will only be possible via small side routes because of new roadblock barring entry to the city, Israeli military resources was quoted by local daily Ha'aretz as saying.

Route 443 runs from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, linking several West Bank villages to Ramallah. Before the expressway's partial closure in 2002, it was estimated that an average of 55,000 Palestinian villagers used it on a daily basis to reach Ramallah and other West Bank towns.

In the first two years of the second intifada, or uprising, starting in 2000, at least seven were killed by roadside attack, which began with rock throwing and Molotov cocktails aiming at Israeli vehicles and was soon followed by fatal shooting incidents.

In light of the escalation of violence, Israeli army imposed a complete ban on Palestinians by the end of 2002, forbidding them to use the Route 443. Palestinians had to take small bypass roads to travel from one village to another along the road, or to reach Ramallah.

Israeli High Court ruled in December 2009 that the ban is "unauthorized and disproportional" and directed the IDF to find new solutions to secure the route within five months.