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.”

One day before Hillary Clinton begins her maiden visit to Israel and the West Bank as the U.S. secretary of state, an Israeli peace group announced more settlement expansion plans on Palestinian territories, posing an even tougher challenge to the new American administration's peace endeavors.

In a report released on Monday, Peace Now said the Israeli authorities have plans for 73,302 new housing units in Jewish settlements, which would double the number of settlers in the occupied territory and blow the chances for a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

It added that 15,156 units have already been approved, while an additional 58,000 were pending approval. Peace Now warned that if all these plans are realized, the number of settlers in the territories will be doubled to 600,000.

The activist group estimates more than 280,000 Jewish settlers living in 121 settlement blocks in the West Bank and another 200,000 in East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed after its capture in 1967 but has not been internationally recognized.

Many Middle East experts agree with Peace Now in warning that the expansion of the settlements and the demographic growth of Israelis in the occupied territories – where the future Palestinian state is aspired to be established – destroy any chance for a viable peace solution that entails two states.

"The government has the power to decide not to carry out plans, or even to halt construction that has begun," Peace Now said in its report.

However, the next government that Israeli prime minister-designate, right-wing Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, is trying to form is expected to follow through with the expansion plans.

Netanyahu has previously said that while his government would not build new settlements, it would construct within existing ones to accommodate the "natural growth" of their populations. In other words, he would pursue the same policy of the outgoing government of Ehud Olmert, which had multiplied its expansion plans in the past 16 months.

The Housing Ministry replied to the peace group's report by brushing aside the seriousness of the matter, saying it was making "a big deal out of nothing."

But it is a big deal for the Palestinians and international mediators trying to revive a peace process that has been generally paralyzed because of settlement expansion, which is dangerously changing realities on the ground.

Plus, this expansion violates the U.S.-backed international peace road map, which called for a halt to all settlement activity, including "natural growth," and dismantling those built since 2001. But settlement construction jumped 60 percent in 2008 after Palestinian-Israeli peace talks were relaunched at Annapolis in November, and settler population growth in the West Bank and East Jerusalem has increased by 400 percent in 10 years.

Since Israel insists on keeping settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as in-roads leading to the settlements, under any peace agreement, the Palestinians will be effectively left without contiguous lands on which to establish a state.

Palestinians, who see settlement expansion as consolidating the occupation, complain that the international community has done little, if anything, to challenge Israel's illegal activities in the last eight years, and hope that the U.S. Barack Obama administration will deal with the issue more vigorously than its predecessor under George W. Bush.

The Obama administration has vowed to quickly engage in Middle East peace and named a special envoy who in 2001 had sharply criticized Israeli settlement activities. Since his appointment, former Senator George Mitchell has made two trips to the region, but it remains to be seen whether the new administration will actually challenge Israel over its settlement expansion policies.

Speaking in Egypt's Sharm el-Sheikh Monday, at a donors' conference for the reconstruction of Gaza in the aftermath of a destructive Israeli war, Clinton said the United States will work toward a Palestinian state and comprehensive peace.

She made those vague remarks one day before she travels to Israel and the West Bank, which Arab diplomats say they hope would entail a new and clear U.S. position on how Washington plans to pursue a two-state peace solution in the wake of alarming Israeli settlement expansion.

Palestinian officials told the Middle East Times that if the Obama administration is serious about a two-state solution, it must start looking at settlement activities not only as an obstacle to peace, but to declaring them illegal – which they already are under international laws.

Arab commentators say if Israeli settlement expansion continues to be allowed in this manner, the Israelis might find themselves faced without the two-state option, which they claim as the only solution. The only choice left would be a democratic one-state solution, which most Israelis do not want. And maintaining the occupation is not even on the table if the goal is peace.

Chances of coming in from the cold are looking better for Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist movement ruling the Gaza Strip, as the world braces itself for crucial changes in political leaderships and power shifts that might also bring strategic policy turns in the Middle East.

The U.S. George W. Bush administration, which has led a fierce campaign against Hamas and is widely seen as the friendliest U.S. government yet to Israel, has fewer than 150 days left in office, with no sign that the peace talks it is sponsoring between the Palestinian Authority (PA), led by President Mahmoud Abbas, and Israel are getting anywhere.

The Israeli leadership is also on its way out, as a corruption scandal forced Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to announce his resignation next month to elect a new Kadima party leader who will need to keep the coalition government together or else hold snap elections.

Abbas, too, has not yet said whether he will seek re-election if a Palestinian presidential poll is held next January. And he has indicated on several occasions he wants to step down out of frustration that peace negotiations are not making headway toward statehood; neither has he been able to reunite Palestinian ranks and mend the split between Gaza and the West Bank.

Hamas, meanwhile, is keeping a close eye on unfolding and upcoming developments, such as the revived Israeli peace negotiations with its Syrian allies, being mediated by Turkey.

Anticipating key leadership changes, the Islamist movement has already begun to send signs that it deserves to be thought of in a different light and not a "terrorist" organization, and that it is time for the world to revise its strategy in dealing with it.

Since violently forcing out the Fatah-led PA from Gaza in June 2007, Hamas has relentlessly shown that it can withstand the often unbearable military, political and economic pressure that has isolated the impoverished coastal strip and confined its 1.5 million people in a virtual prison.

The Israeli-Western blockade on Gaza and a separate PA administration in the West Bank, which is embraced by the United States and its many allies in the region and the world, has failed to bring Hamas to its knees.

Many analysts agree that the U.S.-inspired sanctions strategy had also failed to turn the impoverished population against Hamas, to which the electorate had given an overwhelming victory in the legislative polls in January 2006 that were internationally hailed as one of the most democratic in the Arab world.

The movement additionally refused to make concessions in recognizing the state of Israel or to renounce "violence" in Western terms and "armed resistance" in Arab terms, the international community's conditions to end Gaza's isolation.

Nevertheless, Hamas tacitly did both when it agreed to a ceasefire with Israel after indirect negotiations mediated by Egypt in June, just as Israel had effectively recognized Hamas as a de facto ruling regime in Gaza.

The Islamist movement agreed to keep militants from firing rockets at nearby southern Israeli towns, and more than two months into the ceasefire, it has kept its word and succeeded, unlike Abbas who had failed to do the same from the time of Israel's withdrawal from the strip in September 2005 until his authority was expelled in June 2007.

The number of rocket attacks from Gaza has been reduced dramatically, and when an occasional mortar is fired, Hamas describes the militants as "traitors" who are seeking to discredit the movement's commitment toward easing the pain of the people.

Israel, meanwhile, had also stopped its daily military operations in Gaza, but is still testing the level of Hamas' obligation before it carries out its own commitments to easing the blockade further.

Or perhaps the Israelis are testing Hamas' patience to see whether its "pragmatic" elements would persevere after having virtually weakened their "moderate" partner, Abbas, by maintaining hundreds of military roadblocks in the West Bank and expanding settlement activities, which have brought the U.S.-backed peace negotiations to a stalemate.

Hamas sources tell the Middle East Times they have taken a political decision to stop fighting Israel until the Israelis sort out their political crisis and elect a new leadership, before Hamas decides the next step. But that next step, they say, will entail a policy of non-confrontation -- even if the new Israeli leadership leans more to the right -- in order to end Gaza's isolation, which they say is a strategy that has already failed.

Hamas also hopes the next U.S. administration, whether Democrat or Republican, will have learned from Bush's mistakes that failed to undermine the movement, but rather weakened Abbas' authority in the occupied West Bank, territory that could also come under Hamas' influence if the current exclusion strategy persists.

The Islamist movement, in the meantime, is trying to demonstrate it is a political power to be reckoned with and that it is willing not to be contentious if given that international recognition.

It has even indicated it does not oppose a negotiated peace settlement with Israel, be that through its own indirect truce talks or through its recognition of the Arab peace initiative, which offered Israel normal relations in return for an Israeli withdrawal from the territories it occupied in 1967 and the establishment of a Palestinian state there.

One of the first U.S.-allied countries to recognize that the exclusion policy has in fact strengthened Hamas is Jordan, the only Arab country besides Egypt to have a formal peace treaty with Israel.

The kingdom, which outlawed Hamas under U.S. pressure and expelled its political leaders shortly after King Abdullah II came to power in 1999, has recently re-opened its channels with the Palestinian movement in meetings between the Hamas' leaders in exile and the chief of Jordan's intelligence service.

Analysts say that Jordan, which has accommodated its own powerful Muslim Brotherhood movement for decades, sees the growing influence of Hamas next door and seeks to bolster its "pragmatic" side. Amman does not see this as damaging the kingdom's alliance with Abbas' authority, which did not oppose its rapprochement efforts and even saw it as helping a Fatah-Hamas reconciliation.

If Jordan succeeds in its policy shift toward Hamas, analysts say it could set an example for the rest of the international community, especially the United States and Israel, to follow suit.

AMMAN -- The Palestinian Hamas movement seems to have realized that the punishment inflicted by Israel on Gaza's 1.5 million Palestinians has been much too severe since it seized control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007, and is now publicly blasting militants who fire rockets at Israel in violation of a truce as traitors.

Israel on Tuesday closed the Nahal Oz crossing, the transit point for fuel into Gaza, and the Sufa passage for food deliveries, a day after a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip slammed into an empty field outside the southern Israeli town of Sderot, causing no casualties or damage.

Prominent Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar described the militants who fired the rocket as "those who collaborate with Israel, because there is a consensus by all Palestinian factions to respect the truce."

The Israeli army says that 40 rockets and mortars have been fired from Gaza since Egypt mediated a truce agreement seven weeks ago. Hamas insists it is respecting the ceasefire and vowed to crack down on smaller militant groups that continue to shoot at Israel.

Zahar told a Gaza radio station the party that fired the rocket was "linked to Israel as they provide a pretext to exercise pressure on the Palestinian people."

Palestinians are still waiting to see whether the truce will result in an ease of Israel's blockade, which has plunged the narrow and densely-populated Mediterranean Strip into yet more poverty.

Israel says it has kept its crossings into the virtual prison open to basic humanitarian supplies since declaring the Gaza Strip a "hostile entity," from where Palestinian militants have regularly fired home-made rockets into bordering Israeli communities.

But it has not specified what these humanitarian items entail, and Palestinians complain the Israelis have been using the transport of basic supplies and fuel to tighten the noose around Gaza under the pretext of militant rocket fire and security.

The result has been a paralysis of the economy.

Aid agencies say that Gazans have had to depend on less than one-fifth of the volume of imported supplies they received in December 2005 – the month before Palestinians voted overwhelmingly in favor of Hamas in legislative elections.

The vote provoked the start of Israeli sanctions in an attempt to isolate the Islamist group, a move that received support by some Western countries, but was viewed by most Palestinians as punishment for their electing Hamas.

With no exports permitted out of Gaza, minimum imports entering, and a total ban on what used to be cheap labor to Israel, at least 37 percent of breadwinners became unemployed. Each one of them has 8.6 dependents, according to the United Nations.

In January, aid agencies one again sounded the alarm, this time warning that the Strip was suffering its worst humanitarian crisis since the Israeli occupation in 1967. The United Nations also stated that the Palestinian economy has suffered "irreversible damage."

The desperation was evident when Palestinians breached the sealed Rafah border crossing with Egypt and more than half of Gaza's population flooded into nearby Egyptian towns to stock up on food and groceries that had run out from their shops and homes.

Egypt was accused of colluding with Israel in "starving" the people, when it closed its Rafah border after Hamas forced out the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, which had co-managed the crossing with Egypt along with EU monitors. The passage is now controlled by Egypt and Hamas, which randomly allow special and medical cases to pass through.

About three-fourths of Gaza's people rely on food aid and almost half of Gaza's people – around 700,000 – depend on food staples provided by the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.

But that covers just two-thirds of their daily nutritional needs. Other required supplements, such as dairy products, meat and fresh fruit and vegetables are expected to be purchased on the open market. But most Gazans simply cannot afford them.

While aid agencies say that they have been able to continue to transport basic food supplies, three U.N. agencies reported in May that flour, rice, sugar, dairy products, milk powder and vegetable oil had run out three times since June 2007.

Items like baby food, olive oil, nuts, chocolate, spices, juices and carbonated drinks have now become luxury items after having gone into short supply since the early days of the closure, according to a U.N. survey.

The survey revealed that three-quarters of Gazans were buying less food than before the blockade, and almost all of them were eating less fresh fruit, vegetables and animal protein, as a result of rising unemployment that has squeezed household budgets, and a 50 percent drop in commercial food imports since December 2007.

The U.N. agencies said that sharply reduced fuel supplies, few spare parts, and only small amounts of cement have been allowed to enter heavily impacting basic infrastructure, such as sewage treatment, waste collection, water supplies, and medical facilities.

Palestinian analysts say the overall pain inflicted on Gaza can be expected to gradually ease, after Hamas clearly made a decision to accept that Israel was holding the stronger, if not all, the cards.

Reports from Gaza say that Israel has allowed a limited number of trucks carrying cement and gravel into the Strip, in addition to shipments of clothes, shoes and refrigerators in the first six weeks after the June 19 truce.

As fighting continues to rage in the Gaza Strip and progress bogs down in the U.S.-sponsored peace negotiations with Israel, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has turned to Russia for help.

Abbas was in Moscow Thursday calling to convene a conference in the Russian capital "as soon as possible" because the Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations that were re-launched at Annapolis in November were not moving forward.

"I regret to say that there are obstacles hindering the application of what was agreed upon in Annapolis," Abbas said in a lecture at Moscow University, from where he earned a history doctorate degree in the 1980s.

"The negotiations are not advancing at the required pace or yielding the progress necessary for us to reach the agreed objectives by the agreed dates," he added, in reference to concluding a peace deal before U.S. President George W. Bush's term expires next January.

Since the Maryland conference, regular Palestinian-Israeli negotiations have been shackled by Jewish settlement expansion on territories where the future Palestinian state is to be set up as part of any peace agreement.

In addition, at least 413 people – most of them Palestinians – have been killed in massive Israeli military offensives in the Hamas-controlled Gaza, the latest of which was on Wednesday after Palestinian militants clashed with Israeli troops at a border fuel terminal that killed three soldiers.

Israel retaliated with an operation that killed 18 Palestinians, including a Reuters cameraman and five children.

On Thursday, a Palestinian militant was killed and two injured in clashes near the Kerem Shalom crossing, in what seems to be a rise in Palestinian cross-border attacks from Gaza, which has been under an Israeli blockade since Hamas ousted the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority from the strip last June.

Gaza's 1.5 million people, who have been sealed in a virtual prison with Egypt's closure of its border as well, was bracing for more bloodshed following Hamas' vow to avenge Wednesday's assault and Israel's warning it would continue its attacks until it stops Palestinian rocket fire and other attacks.

Abbas, who again "strongly condemned Israel's escalation of violence" in Gaza, hopes that the Russians would succeed where the Americans are failing in bringing a halt to the carnage and give impetus to the peace process, according to Palestinian sources.

He called for an "immediate ceasefire" in Gaza between Israel and armed Palestinian groups, saying he would seek Russian President Vladimir Putin's help to bring about such a truce, which is already being mediated by Egypt.

Unlike the United States – and Abbas himself for that matter – Russia is the only member of the international peace Quartet that recognizes the legitimacy of Hamas, which swept the legislative elections in January 2006.

Middle East analysts say this Russian impartiality could give Moscow influence as a successful mediator on different levels for a ceasefire as well as the peace process: between Hamas and Abbas' Palestinian Authority (PA), between Hamas and the Israel-U.S. alliance for a ceasefire, and between the PA and Israel in the peace process.

The Quartet, which laid out the 2003 road map for Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, includes the European Union and United Nations in addition to the United States and Russia.

Independent Palestinian analysts say that Abbas' endeavor for a greater Russian role in the peace process refutes his critics' accusations that the Palestinian president had put all his eggs in the American basket to secure a peace deal and a Palestinian state this year.

Abbas had come under sharp criticism at home for giving Washington, widely seen as much too favorable toward Israel and its policies, the primary role of a peace broker.

His turning toward Moscow, which maintains equally strong relations with both Israel and the Arabs, suggests that he may have realized that the Bush administration will not save him from the predicament of being caught in futile negotiations while Israel continues to build settlements and increase its military assaults, according to some Arab commentators.

They argue that the Russians are in a much better position to mediate a fair settlement than the Americans.

Abbas is due to speak to Putin and other top officials on Friday to push for convening a peace conference in Moscow in June, not so much to replace the U.S. role, but as a follow-up to the Annapolis meeting.

"We will push as hard as we can for it to be held as soon as possible," Abbas told Moscow University students. "We think it is an important conference and we count on it to push forward the peace process between us and the Israelis."

Russia proposed hosting a second conference immediately after Annapolis and sought to convene it in January, but Israel has been unenthusiastic about it because the meeting was meant to include other peace tracks with Syria and Lebanon, while Tel Aviv wants to focus on the Palestinian track.

Nevertheless, Israeli officials said they would attend a Moscow conference, which Washington supports, should it be convened.

Observers, however, say if a Moscow meeting is held at all, it could be a replica of another Annapolis and not produce any substantial results, other than an agreement to continue negotiating.