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.”

Saying they were waging "economic warfare" against the Gaza Strip's Hamas leaders, Israeli officials told the Supreme Court on Sunday that the military intends to start cutting electricity to the Palestinian territory and continue restricting fuel.

The statements by Israel's state attorney, outlining Defense Ministry plans, came in response to a lawsuit filed by Israeli and Palestinian rights groups.

The organizations are asking the Supreme Court to make Israel end fuel restrictions that caused power blackouts in the Gaza Strip this month. The activists argue that the restrictions constitute collective punishment of Gaza's 1.5 million people and violate international law.

Israel's restrictions on shipments into Gaza have become a central issue in the territory's relations with Israel and neighboring Egypt. Israel halted deliveries of food, fuel and other supplies into the strip for 4½ days this month, saying it was acting in response to rocket attacks from Gaza on southern Israel.

Guerrillas in Gaza blew up parts of the border wall between Gaza and Egypt on Wednesday. U.N. officials said roughly half of Gaza's residents have crossed into Egypt since then, many to shop for goods now scarce under the Israeli restrictions.

The Israeli Defense Ministry has determined that a "continuation of a reduction of the supply of fuel and a reduction in the supply of electricity can assist Israel in the fight it is waging against the terror organization that controls the Gaza Strip," the state attorney's office said in the filing with the Supreme Court.

"The minister of defense has wide discretion in regard to fighting, including waging economic warfare," the state attorney's officials said.

In the filing, Israel committed to allowing the European Union to resume supplying Gaza with weekly shipments of 2.2 million liters of industrial fuel. The fuel is used by Gaza's sole power plant, which shut down last week after its supply ran out. Palestinian electricity authorities said the plant's shutdown cut power to about 500,000 people in central Gaza.

The United Nations said the fuel cuts deprived about 40 percent of Gaza's people of running water and compelled Gaza to dump untreated sewage into the Mediterranean. Hospitals relied on generators.

Israel allowed fuel for the plant to enter Gaza last week. The plant received enough fuel to resume production at about half capacity, Palestinian authorities said.

Gaza receives as much as 70 percent of its electricity from Israeli power lines, Israeli and Palestinian officials say. In the court filing, the state attorney's office said Israel intends to reduce supply by 5 percent to three lines starting Feb. 7.

Even before this month's restrictions, electricity supply in Gaza ran about 30 percent below demand, officials overseeing Gaza's power plant said last week.

Israel's limits on fuel for the power plant and the planned cuts in power will reduce electricity to Gaza by about another 20 percent, according to Sari Bashi, director of the Israeli human rights group Gisha, one of the organizations that brought the court case.

Israel has a "legitimate desire" to stop rocket attacks from Gaza, but has yet to show how it can achieve that by "crippling hospitals and water wells," Bashi said.

"Irregardless of the effect of the cuts, the cuts are illegal . . . because they are designed to punish civilians for the acts of militants," Bashi said.

The state attorney said Israel intended to meet at least "the minimum humanitarian criteria" in allowing in fuel for the power plant and automobiles, and diesel fuel.

"This is not against international law; it is not collective punishment," said Arye Mekel, spokesman for the Foreign Ministry.

The Supreme Court set no date for its ruling.

Israeli officials said after imposing the blockade that they would not allow shortages in Gaza to grow into a humanitarian crisis.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made the same pledge to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in a meeting in Jerusalem on Sunday, said David Baker, an Olmert spokesman.

"Both leaders agreed to allow for continuation of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip," Baker said.

Hamas, an armed Islamic movement that does not recognize Israel's right to exist, took control of the Gaza Strip in June, routing Abbas's Fatah movement in days of fighting. Fatah was left to govern only the West Bank. Israel and Egypt have since all but sealed off the crossings that allow Gazans to travel and trade.

Palestinians overwhelmed Egyptian border guards late last week when the Egyptians used cattle prods and police dogs to try to corral them back into Gaza. After the crowds injured about 40 Egyptian officers, security forces pulled back Friday, allowing Gazans to flow in and out at will, Egypt said.

On Sunday, Egyptian officials tried again to regain control of the border and moved to choke off the flow of goods to Egyptian towns near Gaza -- hoping that with nothing left to buy, Gazans would return home. Egyptian authorities manned blockades near the Suez Canal on Saturday and Sunday.

"It seems they will put all of north Sinai under siege to get rid of the Palestinians," trucker Ali Abu Mahdi, 42, said late Saturday night. He was stranded at an Egyptian checkpoint with a truck full of flour and motorcycles he had hoped to sell to Gazans.

Four days into an Israeli blockade that has cut off food and fuel to the Gaza Strip, residents of the strip contemplated Monday how long it would be until disaster hit. One family of 13, shivering in the cold, counted its eight remaining candles. A bakery that normally feeds thousands had three days' worth of flour.

Hospital generators with enough fuel for three days and no spare parts powered incubators in which twin boys born 2 1/2 months prematurely were being kept alive, their thin chests heaving convulsively.

Israel agreed Monday to allow in a one-time shipment of fuel, food and medicine on Tuesday, after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak telephoned Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak to appeal on behalf of Gaza's 1.5 million people. But Israel gave no indication when it planned to fully lift the blockade, imposed Friday in response to escalating rocket attacks from the Palestinian territory.

In the neonatal intensive care unit of Gaza City's main hospital Monday, physician Radwan Hassouna tapped the plastic incubator of Karam al-Namy, one of the 1 1/2 -pound twins, and ticked off the electrical equipment keeping the baby alive.

"He has a ventilator. He has an oxygenator. He has photo therapy," or light to keep him from developing jaundice, Hassouna said. An intravenous pump, he added. And monitors.

If the generators broke down, Karam and his twin brother, Kareem, would die in an instant, Hassouna said.

Leaving the hospital after seeing his young sons, Ashraf al-Namy said he feared he would never see them alive again. "I'm afraid when the electricity goes off," he said. "They only live on artificial respiration. What is going to happen to them?"

Israel closed the border crossings into Gaza on Friday to enforce its demand that the armed Hamas movement that controls Gaza bring a halt to rocket attacks into Israeli territory.

From Tuesday to Friday last week, more than 150 rockets were fired from Gaza. None caused any fatalities, although Palestinian gunmen killed an Ecuadoran farmhand working in a field near Gaza on Tuesday, the day Israeli forces unleashed large-scale ground and air assaults against targets in the northern part of the strip.

Israeli military operations from Tuesday to Sunday killed more than 30 people in Gaza, most of them gunmen, Palestinian officials said.

"As far as I'm concerned, Gaza residents will walk, without gas for their cars, because they have a murderous, terrorist regime that doesn't let people in southern Israel live in peace," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told lawmakers from his Kadima party earlier Monday.

Rocket attacks into Israel have declined from more than 30 a day last week to five on Sunday. By late Monday, at least eight rockets and mortar shells had landed.

Israel has limited the flow of supplies to Gaza since Hamas seized power here in June, routing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement, Hamas's partner in a short-lived unity government. Stores of medicine, fuel and other staples had dwindled even before the blockade, Palestinian doctors and engineers here said.

Shlomo Dror, spokesman for Israel's Coordinator of Activities in the Territories, has said repeatedly since Friday that Israel would not allow a humanitarian crisis to occur in Gaza.

By Monday, however, the people of Gaza had had more than a glimpse of what such a crisis would look like.

Gas stations had closed, having exhausted their fuel supplies. Some bakeries had run out of flour.

The U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which distributes food rations to 860,000 Palestinian refugees in Gaza, said Monday that without fuel it would have to suspend operations by Friday. The World Food Program, whose rations help feed another 270,000 Gaza residents, said it would have to stop distributions by Thursday unless it gets more fuel.

The Gaza Strip's power plant, which supplies electricity to about 500,000 people in Gaza City and elsewhere, ran out of fuel Sunday night and was shut down, Palestinians in charge of the electrical system said.

The power plant provided about 25 percent of Gaza's total electricity.

Five power lines from Israel supply another 70 percent, Palestinian and Israeli officials said. Except for one power line damaged before this week, the Israeli power supply to Gaza has not been affected, Israeli and Palestinian authorities said.

However, there is little connection between the grids that carry the electricity from the power plant and the grids that carry Israeli power, said Rafiq Maliha, the project manager of the power plant.

Additionally, the Gaza City network is operated manually, requiring a worker to throw a breaker to connect each area, Maliha said. That makes it difficult to feed electricity from other networks to the one that had been supplied by the power plant.

Power at the main Gaza City hospital came on without notice Monday afternoon, for the first time in about 18 hours. Gaza City moved in and out of blackout through Monday night.

"Gaza is dying slowly," said Ahmed Bahar, a Hamas official, with "an international silence, an Arab silence."

On Monday, Hamas officials urged neighboring Egypt to open its Rafah crossing into the Gaza Strip to allow supplies to enter. Egypt has kept the crossing closed since June, in solidarity with Abbas's government in the West Bank.

There were signs Monday that the blockade was eroding popular support for Hamas.

The movement organized a march by children and medical workers Monday to protest the blockade. The march consisted almost entirely of young boys waving Palestinian flags as they streamed through Gaza City alongside a few Hamas officials and other adults.

Few people along the route joined the march or even appeared to look up as they went about on foot, bicycles and donkey carts, or in the relatively few automobiles still on the road, to search for food.

Wooden stands with cauliflower, tomatoes and other goods grown in Gaza still appeared on street corners. Boys with donkey carts offered fruit brought in earlier from Israel. Meat was twice the price it was 10 days ago.

With some bakeries closed, the normal five-minute wait for bread grew to an hour at one of the bakeries open Monday.

"People say this all started after George Bush visited," observed Hisham al-Ashrami, 31, speaking over his shoulder as he scooped freshly baked loaves off a conveyor belt and into his customers' plastic sacks. The line of people waiting for bread snaked out the door. "They say he gave Israel the green light," Ashrami said.

Other Gaza residents echoed his comments, suspecting a link between Bush's visit to the Middle East this month and the Israeli crackdown on Gaza.

"Why do you think that is?" Ashrami said. "These are all civilians here," he said, gesturing at the bundled-up men, women and children crowded before his bread trays.

He estimated the bakery had enough flour left for three days.

Haya al-Serraj, 25, left the shop with a sack stretched to bursting by loaves of bread for her extended family of 13.

The family still has enough food but only two boxes of candles -- eight in all, Serraj said.

"Enough for two days, I hope," Serraj said cheerfully, then shook her head. "I don't think so."

Serraj plays games with her brother and sister, ages 2 and 3, to distract them during nights without heat, lights or TV, she said. Last week, when Israeli airstrikes were heaviest, she tried to soothe the children, she said.

"But you can tell, as much as you sing them songs and play with them, they must still be starting to figure out what's going on," she said. "They already know. They know this isn't normal."

A day after their leaders announced a new push for peace, Israelis and Palestinians returned Wednesday to a familiar and deadly routine, deeply skeptical over the timetable set for the talks and whether an end to the conflict is achievable at all in the current political climate.

In cafes and blogs in the Arab world, the Annapolis conference prompted little more than wisecracks. Commentators made much of a linguistic coincidence: In Arabic, "ana polis" means "I am the police."

President Bush's message, former Lebanese cabinet minister Essam Norman wrote in that country's opposition Al-Akhbar newspaper, was: "I am the policeman of the Middle East, responsible for your safety and security. Beware devious troublemaking. Israel isn't the enemy, Iran is."

The United States had succeeded only in "dragging the Arabs to a diplomatic talkfest," Norman wrote.

While newspapers in Israel and the Palestinian territories carried extensive coverage of the Annapolis conference -- some hopeful, much of it doubtful -- there were few indications on the ground that what Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called a "historic" moment in the six-decade conflict had taken place.

The talks, officially inaugurated Wednesday in a White House meeting, represent the first formal Israeli-Palestinian peace process in nearly seven years. But the failed legacy of other peace efforts named for their venues -- Madrid, Oslo and Camp David -- and the still-unfulfilled promise of a U.S.-backed "road map" toward a Palestinian state made the pledge of peace by the end of next year seem like wishful thinking to some observers.

"The event in Annapolis was a nonevent," said Ali Jarbawi, a political science professor at Bir Zeit University near the West Bank city of Ramallah. "There was nothing there -- three speeches and that's it. For people here, the reaction is simple. We'll believe it when we see it."

Demonstrators crowded again in front of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's residence in Jerusalem. But unlike protesters of recent days, who were worried that Olmert might give up land in the West Bank to make way for a Palestinian state, the few who assembled there Wednesday morning were angry over low teachers' salaries.

The rain of rockets from the Gaza Strip intensified, as armed Palestinian groups opposed to talks with the Jewish state had promised the day before. Israeli military officials said at least 16 rockets and mortar shells were fired Wednesday into southern Israel, one of them damaging a building in a farming community in the western Negev desert.

The Israeli air force retaliated by firing on what officials described as a military post manned by gunmen from Hamas. The airstrike near the central Gaza city of Khan Younis killed two Hamas gunmen and wounded five others, Palestinian health officials said.

Hamas rejects Israel's right to exist and has labeled Abbas a "collaborator" with the Israeli occupation for attending the Annapolis meeting. The radical Islamic group, which favors armed attacks over negotiations to force Israel to concede land, release thousands of Palestinian prisoners and give rights to refugees, was not invited.

Even some officials in Olmert's cabinet questioned the feasibility of arranging peace in one year given the chaotic state of the Palestinian electorate.

Speaking to Israeli border police recruits at a military base, Avi Dichter, a leader of Olmert's Kadima party and public security minister, said he did not believe Palestinian security forces could dismantle armed Palestinian groups at war with Israel on the timeline set at Annapolis.

Doing so is a central element of the 2003 "road map," to which each side recommitted itself at the conference. Dichter suggested that the end of next year may be just the start.

"I believe that by the end of 2008 we'll have a better idea regarding their performance," Dichter said to reporters at the base. "This could lead to a very positive, significant process."

Commentary in the Arab world was less optimistic. Egypt and other countries that the United States considers moderate went to the talks only because the Bush administration "ordered" them to, said Emad Gad, an analyst with Egypt's al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.

"The Arab regimes exported skepticism to their people as self-defense . . . to preempt any popular reaction," Gad said. "Leaders knew Annapolis will not score big goals."

The participation of Saudi leaders, sitting for the first time with Israel in peace talks, was seen as a coup for the Bush administration. Not too much should be made of that, pro-government newspaper editor Jamal Khashoggi wrote in Wednesday's Al-Watan newspaper.

The Saudi kingdom "will have the courage to announce its relinquishing of the Annapolis conference if it decides it is opposed to it, just as it had the courage to attend a conference whose terms the Americans barely managed to define at the last moment," he wrote.

In Iraq, whose government was invited to Annapolis but declined to attend, officials said they were concentrating on Iraq's own problems. "We have a lot to do in Iraq rather than get involved in regional or international issues," said Sadiq al-Rikabi, a top adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said the government did not stay away out of solidarity with Iran, whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on Wednesday renewed predictions of Israel's demise. Even the most "politically doltish individuals" would realize that the talks were "a failure from the beginning," Iran's state news agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.

Dabbagh noted that Maliki this week signed a major agreement with Bush that would possibly prolong the U.S. presence in Iraq. "If we wanted to follow the footprints of Iran, we would have not have signed any joint declaration with the United States," Dabbagh said. "We have our independent views. This has nothing to do with Iran."

Dabbagh said the Iraqi government "will welcome any agreement between Israel and the Palestinians." His comments reflected a change in tone from the government of Saddam Hussein, who was one of Israel's staunchest opponents in the Arab world and supported Palestinian armed struggle against Israel.

Today, Iraq and Israel share the United States as a key ally while many of Iraq's Sunni Arab neighbors are wary of its Shiite-led government and its friendliness with Iran.

"There is a sort of anger among the Palestinians," Dabbagh said. "They supported Saddam, and some still support Saddam."

But Dabbagh added: "We support the current government of Mahmoud Abbas."

All but sealed off by Egypt and Israel, Gaza presented an intensifying security concern to its neighbors and a fast-approaching humanitarian crisis Sunday, three days after its takeover by Hamas.

Palestinian boys spilled over the rusted metal fence at Gaza's unguarded border to fly kites in the no man's land between Gaza and Egypt. Palestinian security forces, dominated by the Fatah movement, fled their border posts last week in the course of their rout by Hamas fighters.

Egyptian soldiers posted every 100 feet or so have effectively served on border duty for both sides of the frontier in the first days of Hamas's administration. The Egyptians chucked rocks at Palestinian boys who clung to the barbed wire and low concrete walls on the Egyptian side of the border at Salaheldin, a long-closed crossing 1 1/2 miles from the main Rafah transit point between Gaza and Egypt.

"The Jews have left us, but now we're fighting each other over power," Bahaa Abogazar, a 16-year-old Palestinian boy, shouted through the barbed wire.

Egyptians who live in the border area said Hamas fighters showed up at the wall briefly on Friday, rocket launchers on their shoulders, and surveyed the southern border of their new mini-state.

Fighters in Gaza -- it wasn't clear from which faction, residents and soldiers said -- tried to blow a hole through the border wall earlier in the week. Hamas fighters pursuing Fatah fighters fired toward Egyptian soldiers Friday, an Egyptian border soldier in a fraying green uniform said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the events.

For decades, smugglers crawling on their hands and knees have hauled weapons through border tunnels. The Egyptian soldier said Saturday that smuggling has surged since Hamas's takeover of Gaza, and that more than 20 smugglers were caught in the previous three days.

The soldier pointed to a concrete house behind him. Two other Egyptian soldiers were positioned near a hole inside, he said, ready to catch anyone who emerged from the tunnel that connects Gaza to Egypt's Sinai.

"Hamas does not have time for the borders. Hamas is looking for traitors" in Gaza, an Egyptian merchant, Mahmoud al-Shaer, said as he scooped dried spices from plastic sacks at his shop at the border.

Egypt closed the border with Gaza last week when the fighting started. European Union monitors have suspended oversight at the frontier since Thursday because of security concerns. Egyptian officials said the decision to reopen Gaza's border would be made in consultation with the European Union and Israel.

Israel has largely closed Gaza's other land borders since Hamas took over and has kept close watch of Gaza's Mediterranean shores.

Gaza residents "are in a cage, and the door is closed," wailed Samira Abou Khanazsh, 47, who makes a living buying cheap goods in Egypt and selling them back home in Gaza.

She and hundreds of other poor Gazans were trapped on the Egyptian side of the sealed border when the fighting escalated last week and have been sleeping in a field, in empty houses and on the floor and dirt courtyard of a cafe since then.

The control of Gaza by Hamas, a militant organization that is hostile to its neighbors and embraces a strict interpretation of Islam, is an unwelcome development for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Fearing the popularity of Islamic movements, Mubarak's administration overhauled election laws this year and arrested hundreds of opposition figures in a drive to neutralize Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic political and social movement.

With U.S. support, the Egyptian government in recent months has stepped up training of Fatah fighters in Egypt.

An Egyptian Interior Ministry official at the Rafah crossing played down the silence reigning over the Gaza side of the border Sunday, with shooting stilled and Gaza's fearful residents staying indoors. "Let them stay under siege a few more days and then you'll see Hamas's response," said the official, who did not give his name.

Calls to an Egyptian government spokesman went unanswered Sunday.

A spokesman for Israel's Foreign Ministry said by telephone that his country feared that more "weapons, support and know-how" would move across the Gaza-Egypt border and through the tunnels under it now that Hamas was in control of Gaza.

"The entire international community is digesting this new Hamas administration in Gaza, this new, unfortunate development," said Mark Regev, the spokesman.

Any decision on reopening the borders probably would wait until consultations with the Bush administration and European foreign ministers early this week, Regev indicated.

In cellphone calls, some Gaza residents sought to reassure family members stuck on the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing.

Fatima Mohammed called her husband here and said that Hamas fighters in the town of Khan Younis were going house-to-house collecting weapons. The move had calmed Gaza's chronic gunplay, leaving two feuding families there to fight with sticks instead of AK-47s, she said.

"Now, there is rule of law," Mohammed told a reporter.

Other residents were more worried. Markets had reopened in Gaza after the fighting, residents said by telephone, but shelves were emptying quickly, even though the price of staples such as flour had more than quadrupled since last week.

"In five days minimum, Gaza will starve," said Samir Abou Singher, a Palestinian Authority security officer, who had called the home of a relative who lives near Rafah. Singher, who recently returned from more than two months of training in Egypt, said he had remained in his house since then, as Hamas took over.

"In two days time, if there is no food or medicine in Gaza, all the Palestinian people will head to the border with Egypt,'' Singher warned.

Sami Abu Zouhri, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, said Hamas would feed Gaza's people, somehow.

"We are working on maintaining order and managing the daily life of Gaza," Zouhri said. "No one can starve the people of Gaza. We are confident that we will succeed in overcoming the siege."

Special correspondent Nora Younis contributed to this report.