Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords.

The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them.

In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B.

The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians.

Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories).

In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long.

The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.

John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector.

The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace.

Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago.

Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid.

Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority".

Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations.

"Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."

Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops.

“All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive.

Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him.

“I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.”

Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay.

“It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.”

He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?”

Illegal annexation

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community.

Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect.

“After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote.

Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation.

Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce.

Extreme poverty

Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower.

While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line.

“How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”.

“Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked.

“You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS.

Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities.

Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn.

Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank

Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent.

“Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found.

Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population.

To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones.

It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services.

“Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER).

Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”

US President Barack Obama telephoned Jordan's King Abdullah II to discuss efforts to "overcome obstacles" facing the launch of Palestinian-Israeli peace talks, the palace said.

"The two leaders discussed Middle East developments, mainly efforts aimed at overcoming obstacles facing the launch of serious and effective Palestinian-Israeli negotiations in line with a two-state solution," a palace statement said.

It quoted the king as telling Obama that the United States "plays a key role in resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which is a priority to achieve a comprehensive peace in the Middle East."

"Efforts must be intensified to launch negotiations that would lead to a two-state solution, which enjoys an international consensus," the king said.

In Washington, the White House said Obama "expressed his appreciation for Jordan's staunch support for a two-state solution and comprehensive peace in the region, and told the King he considers Jordan to be an integral partner of the United States."

The United States has been trying for months to re-launch peace talks, but the Palestinians are demanding that Israel halts all settlement growth in the West Bank and east Jerusalem as a pre-condition for negotiations.

The White House pledged on Friday to push "hard" for the talks in 2010, acknowledging it was a "major disappointment" that Obama's administration was unable to jump-start negotiations in its first year.

Jordan, a key US ally, signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas urged Washington on Sunday to declare an "endgame" to resolve the decades-old Middle East conflict if Israel does not agree to halt settlement growth.

Abbas, in a statement carried by the official Wafa wire service, said Arab states and the Palestinians would present a unified position to the United States offering two options.

"Either Israel adheres to a complete halt to settlements and the guidelines (of negotiations) or America must come and say this is the endgame with respect to determining borders and the refugee issue and other final-status issues."

Abbas has resisted months of US pressure to relaunch peace talks suspended during last year's Gaza war, saying Israel must first freeze all settlement activity in the occupied West Bank, including annexed Arab east Jerusalem.

In November, Israel's hawkish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu enacted a 10-month moratorium on new building starts in the West Bank but excluded east Jerusalem, public buildings and projects already under way.

The United States hailed the move as "unprecedented" but the Palestinians have rejected it as insufficient.

Israel's hardline Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, however, said on Sunday that his country would make no more gestures towards the Palestinians.

"As far as we are concerned, we have exhausted our arsenal of gestures. There will be no more gestures. Right now, it is time for gestures from the Palestinians," he told a press conference.

Last week, Abbas appeared to give some ground by demanding a halt to settlement growth for a "fixed period," but in Sunday's statement he remained adamant about a complete halt.

"We cannot return to the negotiations if Israel stays with this position," Abbas said, referring to the limited moratorium.

US Middle East envoy George Mitchell is expected to return to the region this week to try again to convince both sides to restart negotiations.

Israel's Maariv newspaper reported earlier this month that Washington was pushing a plan to restart peace talks that foresees reaching a final deal in two years and agreeing on permanent borders in nine months.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas on Tuesday said for the first time that he might restart peace negotiations with Israel if it froze settlement expansion for a "fixed period."

"We will not accept the relaunching of negotiations without a complete halt to settlements, including in Jerusalem, for a fixed period," Abbas told reporters in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

It was the first time Abbas appeared to accept some kind of temporary settlement freeze, after months in which he insisted on a total halt to settlement growth pending a final agreement on borders.

The United States has for months been pressing Israel and the Palestinians to relaunch peace negotiations suspended during the Gaza war in December 2008 and January 2009.

After months of US pressure, Israel's hawkish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a 10-month moratorium on new construction in the occupied West Bank but excluded public buildings and projects already under way.

The moratorium also excluded annexed Arab east Jerusalem, which Israel considers part of its "eternal, indivisible" capital but which the Palestinians have demanded as the capital of their promised state.

The Palestinians rejected the moratorium when Netanyahu announced it in November as being insufficient for the relaunch of talks.

The presence of a half million Israelis in more than 100 settlements scattered across the occupied West Bank including east Jerusalem has been one of the thorniest issues in previous rounds of peace talks.

Israel has developed a comprehensive plan for destroying illegal buildings in the occupied West Bank in order to enforce a 10-month easing of settlement construction, local media reported today.

The plan follows the declaration of the moratorium on the construction of new houses in the settlements announced by Israel’s hawkish prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in November after months of US pressure.

Israel’s left-leaning Haaretz newspaper, citing a leaked army memo, said the illegal structures would be destroyed in “lightning operations” during which the army should seal off settlements from the media.

“The settlers view these evictions as the beginning of the disengagement and will strive to prevent demolitions in any way available,” it quoted the document as saying.

“There is no concrete intelligence about intention to take up arms but this scenario cannot be discounted, along with attempting to extract a price tag,” the document said, referring to the policy among some radical settlers of attacking Palestinians in response to military action against the settlements.

The mass-selling >Yediot Aharonot newspaper, citing the same document, said authorities would also accelerate legal action against rioting settlers following several recent confrontations with building inspectors.

The Israeli military declined to provide details about the alleged memo, saying only that it “acts according to the instructions of the democratically elected government.”

The settlers have denounced the plan, with Danny Dayan, the head of the Yesha settler umbrella group, calling it a “declaration of war by the government against civilians.”

Nearly a half million Israelis live in dozens of settlements scattered across the occupied West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem, all of which are considered illegal by the international community.

The Western-backed Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas has said he will not relaunch peace talks suspended nearly a year ago during the Gaza war unless Israel freezes all settlement construction.

The moratorium does not include some 3,000 housing units on which construction has already begun or public buildings in the occupied West Bank, and does not apply to east Jerusalem.