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.”

As President Obama prepares to head to the Middle East this week, administration officials are debating how to toughen their stance against any expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

The measures under discussion — all largely symbolic — include stepping back from America’s near-uniform support for Israel in the United Nations if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel does not agree to a settlement freeze, administration officials said.

Other measures include refraining from the instant Security Council veto of United Nations resolutions that Israel opposes and making use of Mr. Obama’s bully pulpit to criticize the settlements, officials said. Placing conditions on loan guarantees to Israel, as the first President Bush did nearly 20 years ago, is not under discussion, officials said.

Still, talk of even symbolic actions that would publicly show the United States’ ire with Israel, its longtime ally, would be a sharp departure from the previous administration, which limited its distaste with Israel’s settlement expansions to carefully worded diplomatic statements that called them “unhelpful.”

Mr. Obama is to give a much-anticipated speech to the Muslim world from Egypt on Thursday. “There are things that could get the attention of the Israeli public,” a senior administration official said, touching on the widespread belief within the administration that any Israeli prime minister risks political peril if the Israeli electorate views him as endangering the country’s relationship with the United States.

But, the official added, “Israel is a critical United States ally, and no one in this administration expects that not to continue.” He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly.

White House officials said Mr. Obama would not make the Cairo speech entirely about the Arab-Israeli conflict, but would instead seek to engage Muslims on the panoply of issues facing Islam and the West, including Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran.

But the core issue, administration officials said, is the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. “I want to use the occasion to deliver a broader message about how the United States can change for the better its relationship with the Muslim world,” Mr. Obama told reporters last week. “But certainly, the issue of Middle East peace is something that is going to need to be addressed. It is a critical factor in the minds of many Arabs in countries throughout the region and beyond the region.”

The trip, stemming from a visit scheduled to commemorate trans-Atlantic ties — Mr. Obama plans to walk the beaches of Normandy with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and visit the site of the concentration camp that his great-uncle helped liberate at Buchenwald in Germany — will also now offer Mr. Obama an opportunity to define how he plans to navigate America’s relationship with the Muslim world.

He will begin the Middle East leg of the trip in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he will take King Abdullah a wish list from not just himself, but from Israeli and Palestinian officials as well. Officials said Mr. Obama was hoping that King Abdullah would agree to make an overture to Israel that could, in turn, get Israel to move more quickly on a peace process.

Israeli officials would love to see Saudi Arabia open an interests section in Tel Aviv (Saudi Arabia would never put one in Jerusalem because Palestinians see the city as the site of their future capital), or issue a few symbolic tourist visas for Israelis, or agree to hold open meetings with Israeli counterparts. These would be a tall order for the Arab kingdom, which has, thus far, eschewed taking much of a role that could be seen as acknowledging Israel.

Meanwhile, Palestinian officials want Mr. Obama to prod King Abdullah to provide more aid for the Palestinian Authority, which the Saudis have largely set aside in recent months as the Palestinian political system has become increasingly fractured.

White House officials said they wanted greater Arab acceptance of Mr. Obama’s peace plans. But past American presidents — particularly George W. Bush — had sought the same without much luck.

“Now that Obama has raised the pressure on the Israelis when it comes to settlement freeze, it’s time to start raising pressure on the Arab states for something in return,” said Ghaith al-Omari, a former negotiator for Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president. “Saudi is the key to unlocking the rest of the Arab world.”

Saudi Arabia may also be part of the key to addressing the morass in Pakistan. Obama administration officials are hoping to get Saudi Arabia to use its influence with the Pakistani opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, to figure out a way to bring some stability to Pakistan’s tumultuous politics as President Asif Ali Zardari becomes increasingly unpopular.

In addition, Mr. Obama will probably touch on his outreach to Iran, and his withdrawal plans for Iraq. He will talk about his decision to shut down the detention center at Guantلnamo Bay, Cuba, and refer in his speech to the contributions of Muslims to American society and the world as a whole, aides said.

But Mr. Obama’s remarks in Egypt, though aimed at the Muslim world, will also be carefully parsed in Israel, foreign policy experts said. The president will be walking a fine line between reassuring Israel that America will remain a guarantor of Israeli security and between sounding a warning that he is getting impatient with the slow movement toward Palestinian statehood.

When asked on Thursday what he would do if Mr. Netanyahu continued to balk at a settlement freeze, Mr. Obama said he was not yet ready to offer an “or else.” “In my conversations with Prime Minister Netanyahu, I was very clear about the need to stop the settlements; to make sure that we are stopping the building of outposts; to work with the Palestinian Authority in order to alleviate some of the pressures that the Palestinian people are under in terms of travel and commerce,” Mr. Obama said.

“That conversation only took place last week.”

President Obama called on Israelis and Palestinians on Thursday to move swiftly toward peace talks, as his administration embarked on its first public dispute with Israel.

Speaking to reporters at the White House after talks with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, Mr. Obama said that the absence of peace between Israelis and Palestinians was clogging up other critical issues in the Middle East.

“Time is of the essence,” Mr. Obama said. “We can’t continue with the drift and the increased fear on both sides, the sense of hopelessness that we’ve seen for too many years now. We need to get this thing back on track.”

Mr. Obama reiterated his call for a halt to Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and said he expected a response soon from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

Mr. Obama’s words echoed — albeit less bluntly — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s brusque call on Wednesday for a complete freeze of construction in settlements on the West Bank. In expansive language that left no wiggle room, Mrs. Clinton said that Mr. Obama “wants to see a stop to settlements — not some settlements, not outposts, not natural growth exceptions.”

Her comments took Israeli officials by surprise.

Mr. Obama said something similar last week during private talks with Mr. Netanyahu at the White House, and Mr. Netanyahu responded that he could crack down on outposts, but not on the natural growth of settlements, according to American and Israeli officials.

The administration then took the quarrel public, laying down the marker that allowing natural growth would not satisfy the United States and that administration officials would not limit themselves to the diplo-speak of the past that simply called settlement expansion “unhelpful.” The decision left the two allies hurtling toward their first public fight.

On Thursday, Mr. Netanyahu’s spokesman, Mark Regev, said that “normal life” would be allowed in settlements in the occupied West Bank, using the phrase that Israel often uses to describe continued construction to accommodate population growth.

Privately, Israeli officials said they were upset by the administration’s hard line. Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, is scheduled to visit Washington next week with Israel’s response to Mr. Obama’s call for a settlement freeze, American officials said.

Advisers to the Palestinian Authority said that Mr. Abbas’s meetings in Washington with administration officials — including Mrs. Clinton and the national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones — had been more amicable than the Israelis’ meetings were. That could reflect the view in Washington that Mr. Abbas does not have the political weight at the moment to push through anything on the Palestinian side.

Part of the reason administration officials are pushing the Israelis on settlements is that they think that stance will bolster Mr. Abbas, who has an increasingly fractured Palestinian population. Mr. Obama congratulated Mr. Abbas for adhering to the West’s argument that he should not form a national unity government with the militant Islamist organization Hamas until Hamas forswears violence and recognizes Israel’s right to exist.

Several American presidents, from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, have called on Israelis to halt settlement activity, to no avail. The question now, Middle East experts said, is how far Mr. Obama is willing to go to make that happen.

“Hillary Clinton’s statement was notable because the language was stronger than we’ve heard in years,” said Ali Abunimah, the co-founder of ElectronicIntifada, a Web site that analyzes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “And clearer than we’ve heard in years. But the burden of proof is still on them. If it’s just going to be strong statements, that’s not enough.”

Administration officials have not said whether there is an “or else” attached to their demand for a settlement freeze.

Mr. Obama said Thursday that it was not yet time for that. “In my conversations with Prime Minister Netanyahu, I was very clear of the need to stop settlements, stop the building of outposts,” he said. “I think we don’t have a moment to lose, but I don’t make decisions based on a conversation we just had last week.”

Administration officials are trying to elicit support for Mr. Obama’s stance from pro-Israel lawmakers in Congress, including Senator John Kerry, the Democrat of Massachusetts who is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

If they can expand that support to include House members like Gary Ackerman and Nita M. Lowey, both Democrats of New York, then Mr. Netanyahu could find himself on the defensive at home for allowing Israel’s relationship with its most powerful backer, the United States, to sour, foreign policy experts said.

“This approach is predicated on the assumption that an Israeli prime minister needs a tough American president to justify tough decisions to an Israeli public,” said Martin Indyk, director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy and a former United States ambassador to Israel. “People in the American Jewish community and in Israel are sick of settlement activity. The whole zeitgeist has changed.”

ISTANBUL, Turkey — President Obama continued to use his bully pulpit on Tuesday to call for Israelis and Palestinians to make the compromises necessary to reach a Middle East peace accord.

During a question-and-answer session with university students here, Mr. Obama said that he still believes that “peace in the Middle East is possible. I think it will be based on two states side by side,” he said.

“What we need,” Mr. Obama said, “is political will and courage on the part of the leadership.”

His comments come a day after he publicly repudiated statements from Israel’s hawkish new foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, that agreements reached at an American-sponsored peace conference in Annapolis, Md., in 2007 have “no validity.”

Speaking before the Turkish parliament on Monday, Mr. Obama said that Palestinian statehood was “a goal that the parties agreed to in the roadmap and at Annapolis. That is a goal that I will actively pursue as president.”

The road map refers to a 2003 outline of steps toward a peace agreement.

Mr. Obama, nearing the end of his maiden overseas trip, made an effort to connect with the young people assembled before him in Istanbul’s Tophane-I-Amire Hall, a centuries-old exhibition hall. He took questions from them about climate change, Turkey’s entry into the European Union and whether he was, deep down, more like President Bush than he admitted. (To that, Mr. Obama replied that changing United States policy was more like turning a tanker ship, and would take time.)

He often reverted to his favorite rhetorical devices — straw men — to make his points to the students. For instance, he said that “some people say that I’m being too idealistic” and ask him why he’s reaching out to Iranians, saying that trying to use diplomacy to stop Iran from getting a nuclear bomb is “too hard.”

“My attitude is all these things are hard,” Mr. Obama said. He added that he believed he still had to try.

“I am personally committed to a new chapter in American engagement,” Mr. Obama told the students, who sat in a tight circle around him. “We can’t afford to talk past one another and focus only on our differences, or to let the walls of mistrust go up around us.”

Mr. Obama spent the morning meeting with religious leaders, and then went on a tour of Hagia Sophia, once the biggest church in Christendom and now a museum, and the famed 17th-century Blue Mosque.

His plane departed Istanbul at 2:30 p.m. local time.

On Monday, setting out his perspective on America’s relationship with the Islamic world, Mr. Obama told the Turkish Parliament that: “America’s relationship with the Muslim community, the Muslim world, cannot and will not just be based upon opposition to terrorism,” he said. “We seek broader engagement based upon mutual interest and mutual respect.”

Showing more self-confidence each day on his trip, Mr. Obama, in addressing a majority Muslim country for the first time, appeared to have prepared carefully for one particular line in his wide-ranging speech.

“The United States has been enriched by Muslim-Americans,” he said. “Many other Americans have Muslims in their family, or have lived in a Muslim-majority country.

“I know,” he said, “because I am one of them.”

And then he paused. Throughout his speech, he had moved swiftly from passage to passage, but this time, he waited for the interpreter to catch up. After about five seconds, the applause came.

The line was a bold one for Mr. Obama, who has been falsely described as a Muslim. The claim persists on some right-wing Web sites, which may try to interpret his remarks as proof of that view.

But Mr. Obama, who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, is calculating that the benefits of demonstrating to the Muslim world that Americans are not antagonistic toward it outweigh the potential political fallout back home. His calculus may also reflect an increased belief that he has enough political capital that he can spend some of it in pursuit of strengthening ties between Muslim nations and the West.

Introduced as “Barack Hussein Obama,” the president told the assembly that he planned to push for a two-state solution in the Middle East, despite the view of many foreign policy experts that such a goal will be even more difficult to reach because of the makeup of the new Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, not to mention the fractured state of internal Palestinian politics.

Turkey is crucial to American interests on many fronts. It borders Iraq and Iran; it has deep influence in Afghanistan; and it is helping efforts to forge a peace deal between Israel and Syria.

In choosing Turkey as an example of the type of relationship that can be struck between the United States and an Islamic population, Mr. Obama also seemed to be pushing for more acceptance of the separation of religion and the state. Turkey is a secular Muslim democracy that has recently seemed at war with itself over its own religious identity. Its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has roots in political Islam, a worry to secular Turks.

On Monday morning, Mr. Obama went to pay his respects at the Ankara mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a secularist who established modern Turkey, and the president wrote at some length in a guest book at Ataturk’s shrine.

“It is also clear that the greatest monument to Ataturk’s life is not something that can be cast in stone and marble,” Mr. Obama said during his speech. “His greatest legacy is Turkey’s strong, vibrant secular democracy, and that is the work that this assembly carries on today.”

Mr. Obama also threw his weight solidly behind Turkey’s accession to the European Union, an issue that has split Europe, with France and Germany lobbying against Turkey’s entry.

“Let me be clear: the United States strongly supports Turkey’s bid to become a member of the European Union,” he said. “We speak not as members of the E.U., but as close friends of both Turkey and Europe.”

The president also waded into the fraught issue of Turkey’s relations with Armenia, and the genocide of more than a million Ottoman Armenians beginning in 1915. Turkey acknowledges the killings but says they did not amount to a systematic genocide, and it has vehemently opposed the introduction of a bill in the United States Congress that would define it that way.

As a senator, Mr. Obama voiced support for the legislation, but during a news conference with President Abdullah Gul before the Parliament speech, he did not use the word genocide and said Turkey and Armenia had made progress in talks.

Armenian-Americans were quick to voice their ire.

“In his remarks today in Ankara, President Obama missed a valuable opportunity to honor his public pledge to recognize the Armenian genocide,” Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America, said in a statement.

Mr. Obama’s remarks, he said, fell “far short of the clear promise he made as a candidate that he would, as president, fully and unequivocally recognize this crime against humanity.”

During the Parliament speech, Mr. Obama did speak of the Armenia issue, saying, “History is often tragic, but unresolved, it can be a heavy weight.”

He said that the United States “still struggles with the legacies of slavery and segregation, the past treatment of Native Americans.”

The Obama administration intends to provide some $900 million to help rebuild Gaza after the Israeli incursion that ended last month, administration officials said Monday.

In an early sign of how the administration plans to deal with Hamas, the militant Islamist group that controls Gaza, an official said that the aid would not go to Hamas but would be funneled through nongovernmental organizations.

By seeking to aid Gazans but not Hamas, the administration is following the lead of the Bush administration, which sent money to Gaza through nongovernmental organizations. In December, it said it would give $85 million to the United Nations agency that provides aid to Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

The United States considers Hamas a terrorist organization, and the Bush administration refused to have any formal dealings with the group.

The aid will include new spending as well as money already set aside for the Palestinian Authority, and it will be formally announced next week when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton travels to a Palestinian donors' conference in Sharm el Sheik, Egypt, the officials said.

The aid, first reported by Reuters, would have to be approved by Congress, where many lawmakers are skittish about even appearing to help Hamas until it renounces violence and recognizes Israel's right to exist.

"None of the money will go to Hamas, it will be funneled through NGOs and UN groups," said an administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about the aid before Clinton announced it.

The donors' conference in Egypt is seeking to raise close to $2 billion to rebuild Gaza, which was devastated by the three-week war with Israel. Some of the $900 million from the United States will go to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, officials said.

But even if the bulk of the money goes to Gaza, it will do little good unless Israel first opens the border crossing into the territory, said Daniel Levy, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a research organization in Washington.

"It's a good effort, but the money can't be spent unless materials can get into Gaza," Levy said. "The next step is opening the border crossings, and that requires more than just signing a check."

Hamas has demanded the opening of the crossings as part of truce negotiations being conducted through Egypt. Israel, which imposed an embargo after Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007, demands an end to rocket fire from Gaza, a halt to weapons smuggling and the release of a captive Israeli soldier.

After the donors' conference in Egypt, Clinton will make her first trip to Israel as secretary of state, Israeli officials said. She is expected to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister-designate.

Clinton is also expected to travel to Ramallah in the West Bank for meetings with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, and Salam Fayyad, the prime minister, whose Fatah organization is the principal rival to Hamas. Administration officials said it was unlikely that Clinton would go to Hamas-controlled Gaza.