ISRAEL's military pullout from Hebron moved into full swing overnight, and the first Palestinian policemen were arriving to replace the departing troops, after the Israeli Knesset approved the redeployment accord by an overwhelming 87 votes to 17.
Outside the Israeli army's military headquarters in the West Bank city, for 30 years a symbol of occupation, hundreds of local Palestinians clapped, danced and chanted late into the night in enthusiastic praise of the Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat, and mild derision of the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu.
Plainclothes Palestinian security agents mingled with the crowds, helping the remaining Israeli troops ensure that the celebration did not get out of hand.
The driving rain helped reduce some of the fears that the transfer of power would be interrupted by more of the violence and bloodshed so frequent in this city down the ages. So, too, did the Israeli army's decision to place a number of known settler extremists under house arrest.
The Israeli pullout, which will leave 80 per cent of the city under Mr Arafat's control, is likely to be completed no later than noon today. Earlier yesterday, troops took down the Israeli flag from the roof of the headquarters building, then the flagpole. They cut away barbed wire, folded tents, loaded watchtowers onto the backs of lorries, packed away boxes and benches and water tanks.
As the pullout proceeded last night, the Israeli military chiefs, who have ruled the city since it was captured during the 1967 war, held a final coordination meeting with the Palestinian officials who are replacing them. Some members of Jibril Rajoub's Palestinian security apparatus were already making themselves comfortable in their new offices in the headquarters building. Today, brief formal ceremonies will complete the transfer of control.
But in contrast to the other major West Bank population centres, from which Israel removed its troops in the course of 1994 and 1995, the army is not leaving Hebron completely.
The renegotiated Hebron "protocol", grudgingly approved by the Israeli cabinet early yesterday morning, and decisively backed in the Knesset some 23 hours later, still provides for the 52 Jewish settler families to stay on in their downtown enclaves, and for a massive Israeli army presence to protect them from the Palestinians - and vice versa.
In his speech to the Knesset, Mr Netanyahu took pains to point out that Israel was not leaving Hebron, but only "redeploying in a part of it". The Jewish community in the city, he declared, "will continue to exist".
Mr Netanyahu also reiterated his long held sense that the Oslo accords he'd inherited, and was now reluctantly being compelled to honour, were badly formulated. It was, for him, "a difficult and painful day", he said.
For Mr Yoav Panili, one of Hebron's Jewish settlers, pedalling through the city with a black flag on his bicycle, the prime minister had proved to be "a liar".
Though Mr Arafat easily secured approval for the deal from his Palestinian Authority executive, there was a bitter debate in the Palestinian Legislative Council in Ramallah, where members protested that they had not even been given copies of the accord.
And more ominously, a spokesman for the Hamas group, Mr lbrahim Ghosheh, noted acerbically that 20,000 Palestinians in the Israeli sector of Hebron would remain under military occupation. He warned darkly of "continued resistance and Jihad" until the Israelis were gone altogether.
(David Horovitz is managing editor of The Jerusalem Report)