TWO SIDES went to war yesterday. Two sides that for a few short months had been working together, carrying out joint patrols, ensuring security for their respective peoples in an unlikely and remarkable partnership.
But yesterday at every crossing (point, where over recent months, Israeli soldiers and Palestinian policemen had set out together on their joint patrols, they now crouched on either side of the dividing lines and turned their guns on each other.
There were isolated incidents that hinted at the lost co operation: the Israeli soldier, hit by Palestinian gunfire and bleeding profusely, evacuated on a stretcher carried by a group of Palestinian policemen; or the impromptu meeting, on a barren stretch of gravel near a Ramallah roadblock, at which a senior Israeli officer and his Palestinian counterpart sealed the release from an Israeli jeep of several Palestinian stone throwers with a firm, sincere handshake.
But such scenes were the exceptions. For the most part, the streets of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip echoed to the cracking of automatic gunfire, Israeli and Palestinian hospitals to the crying of relatives tending their wounded or mourning their dead, and the airwaves to the voices of sanctimonious politicians dodging and ascribing blame.
At the Erez crossing point between Israel and the Gaza Strip, Palestinian policemen took up sniper positions on rooftops and pylons, and fired down relentlessly on the Israeli soldiers below. Inside the strip, where 4,000 Jews live an always precarious existence amidst 1.2 million Palestinians, thousands of Palestinians converged on the two most isolated settlements Kfar Darom and Netzarim - and bombarded the Israeli soldiers on guard there with rocks and petrol bombs.
That soon gave way to all out gun battles as thousands of Palestinian policemen fought the soldiers, now backed up with hurriedly despatched reinforcements, as Israeli helicopter gunships circled overhead.
Residents of another Gaza settlement, Nissanit, were evacuated en masse to the nearby Israeli city of Ashkelon.
In the West Bank, there was fighting in Ramallah, in Bethlehem, and in Nablus. At the southern Ramallah roadblock, where the worst violence took place on Wednesday, there was another gunbattle. With both sides evacuating their wounded under gunfire. "We started this with stones," shouted one Palestinian youth towards a group of journalists at the height of the fighting. "Now we have guns. And we will never be scared. We will happily give our blood."
In Nablus, some of the fiercest exchanges took place around Josef's Tomb, an Israeli held shrine in the Yasser Arafat controlled city. A contingent of Israeli soldiers was trapped inside. Palestinians leapt up to nearby rooftops and, constantly supplied by a string of helpers on the ground, rained down stones. Palestinian gunmen also fired on the building. Israeli reports said at least five soldiers died there.
As night fell, the Palestinian security chief, Mr Jibril Rajoub, was at the shrine, negotiating the extrication of the remaining soldiers. On Israel Radio, Mr Rehavam Ze'evy, a Knesset member too right wing to have joined even Mr Benjamin Netanyahu's right wing coalition, was berating the army for its shameful performance in not sending in reinforcements to set free its own soldiers. "We've completely lost our deterrent power," he railed. "It's an appalling capitulation."
At dusk in Gaza, the first of the day's victims was being laid to rest. Plans were being made for ceremonial funeral processions for other victims of the morning. And police in Jerusalem, where this whole bloody conflict started over an obscure archaeological site, were gearing up for another anticipated day of violence.