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.”

Another step has been proposed to solve the ongoing conflict near the Palestinian town of Bilin, which has protested for five years over the routing of the West Bank security fence. The IDF spokesman said Wednesday that work had begun to move olive trees from the western side of the planned route to the eastern side, to an area west of Ramallah.

The IDF said the work is being carried out for the Ministry of Defense by a private contractor, in coordination with the land's owners, the Civil Administration and the IDF.

According to the controversial original routing, a lot of Palestinian agricultural land would have been "lost" on the western (Israeli) side of the fence, including many olive trees. In September 2007, the High Court ruled that the fence route near Bilin be altered and an alternative routing be proposed that would include the town's land on the eastern side.

This month, two and a half years after the court's ruling, work was begun to change the routing which would "give back" 173 acres of land to Bilin, 40% of the land west of the fence according to the original routing. This still leaves more than 245 acres of Bilin land on the "Israeli" side.

There was little excitement in Bilin over the announcement to move the olive trees. They confirmed that the work had indeed begun, but the Popular Committee, a local organization coordinating the non-violent protests, said that while all land returned constitutes an achievement, much land remains appropriated by the IDF and the recent work is purely cosmetic.

"The trees are usually damaged by being uprooted in an inappropriate manner, and each tree must be well irrigated for a year for it to take root again, if it manages at all," a Popular Committee member said to Ynet.

Another member said that the town's residents do not accept the uprooting of the trees or the changed routing of the fence. "Our position is continued opposition to the existence of the fence on our land," he said.

Arik Asherman of the human rights organization Rabbis for Human Rights said that though the court decision is being implemented late, it was still better late than never. "They should have changed the routing immediately after the court ruling, and not after a few years," he said.

He went on to explain that it should not have come to systematic uprooting of trees. "During the erection of the fence, the contractors were supposed to give back trees that were directly in the fence's route," he said.

"In my opinion, it's better to give back trees than leave them on the other side of the fence to die, but this only shows the evil of the fence. Using security as an excuse, they are sowing destruction and harming human beings," Asherman said. "I hope they manage to replant the trees successfully," he added.

US special envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell is on his way to the region, and the Palestinians are feeling the pressure.

Palestinian sources on Wednesday said that recent talks with American and international sources have shown that the international community does not want the Palestinians to condition the renewal of peace talks on a settlement construction freeze as has been the case so far.

The sources said that the international community was examining the possibility of granting the Palestinians an economic incentive package to encourage them to return to the negotiations table.

Palestinian sources added, "The Americans are looking to provide our leaders with a ladder to get down from the tree they are in, and want us to return to talks, especially in light of the fact that Israel has declared a settlement freeze, and especially in light of the fact that negotiations over the basic principles of the peace process are already being held between us and the Americans and between the Americans and the Israelis."

The sources estimated that if an economic conference for the Palestinians is announced, and if the Palestinians receive a guarantee from the Americans as to the details of a permanent settlement, they may bend on their stance and return to the negotiations table.

In this context, Fatah bodies and the movement's revolutionary council are slated to stand by their position that talks cannot be renewed without a full freeze in settlement construction. But according to the sources, this position will have no impact if the Palestinians get a letter of guarantees from the Americans – a move which Israel opposes.

Either way, the sources say, the end of January is expected to be a critical period. The sources believe that the renewal of peace talks may be announced during Mitchell's visit to Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Meanwhile, the American envoy arrived in Beirut on Tuesday for a two-day visit in Lebanon. Mitchell is slated to travel to Syria, before arriving in Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

During the Beirut visit, Lebanese leaders are slated to reiterate to Mitchell their position on resuming talks with Israel, according to which the IDF must first withdraw from the village of Ghajar, the Shebaa farms and the village of Shuba. The sources will also stress Lebanon's refusal to settle the Palestinian refugees in its borders, and state that Beirut is committed to the Arab peace initiative.

Mitchell's visit comes parallel to Hezbollah parliament member Hassan Fadlallah's statement on Tuesday that "the repeated visits of American representatives in Lebanon are damaging to the country and show that the US has no influence."

Roee Nahmias contributed to this report

Hamas in Gaza tried to ease tension with Israel and Egypt on Tuesday, urging other Palestinians to stop firing rockets into the Jewish state and promising Cairo answers over the shooting of an Egyptian soldier at the border.

Ismail Haniyeh, prime minister of the Islamist movement's government in the coastal enclave, said other armed groups in the Gaza Strip should observe what has amounted to a ceasefire since Israel's major offensive a year ago. That, Haniyeh said, was in the interests of protecting Gazans from Israeli attacks.

On Monday, Israel's defense minister had warned Hamas to rein in its allies "or else" -- a threat of more Israeli action.

Rocket fire by smaller groups Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees, and Israeli air strikes that killed several Palestinians, made the past two weeks among the most violent since the three-week war that killed 13 Israelis and over 1,400 Palestinians before a ceasefire in mid-January 2009.

"We call upon Palestinian factions to intensify their meetings in order to reinforce the national agreement and to work in a joint spirit to protect our people and to protect our interests and to block any possible Israeli aggression against our people," Haniyeh said before a cabinet meeting in Gaza.

Haniyeh said that while he does not foresee another war in Gaza, the Islamist group following the "Israeli escalation" closely.

'Hamas working in good faith'

Despite denials from some of the smaller groups, Hamas has insisted lately there was an agreement to hold back on attacks.

While hostility between Hamas and Israel is the norm, the Palestinian Islamist movement has also been concerned of late over a deterioration in relations with Egypt, which controls the short southern border of the Gaza Strip.

Already frustrated in its efforts to promote reconciliation between Hamas and the rival Fatah party of West Bank-based Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and by its difficulties in brokering a prisoner swap between Hamas and Israel, Cairo was angered last week by the death of a soldier at the Gaza border.

He was shot during clashes when Hamas supporters rallied at the frontier in the town of Rafah to protest at Egyptian efforts to stem supplies reaching Gaza through secret tunnels.

Egyptian officials have said the soldier was hit by a bullet fired from the Palestinian side. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said on Tuesday there was evidence the Egyptian border guard could have been hit by a bullet from his own side.

Whatever the case, Haniyeh said, Hamas was working in good faith to clarify what happened and to protect relations with Cairo: "We are carrying out an investigation ... (which) aims to arrive at the truth and to put measures in place that ensure Palestinian-Egyptian relations are protected."

Cairo has long had cool relations with Hamas, which shares roots with the banned Egyptian opposition movement the Muslim Brotherhood. But Egypt, the first Arab state to make peace with Israel, is also keen to avoid being portrayed as an ally of the Jewish state in its conflict with the Palestinians.

Hamas officials in the Gaza Strip have admitted that they are concerned over the Egyptian underground barrier under construction along the Gaza-Egypt border.

The fence is expected to reach a depth of 18 meters (59 feet), and span 10 km (about 6 miles), and threatens to strangle the Strip's only lifeline – the smuggling tunnels.

Hamas fears that via this channel, Egypt is joining the Palestinian Authority and Israel in creating a three-way siege on the Strip that would severely hurt the movement.

If the Egyptian plans, which are already in the works, are completed, the Palestinian organizations will have a much more difficult time smuggling weapons, especially with the Israeli navy keeping a close eye on its shores.

The Palestinians are equally concerned with the strain the barrier will put on their ability to smuggle basic living goods into the Strip.

"We are capable of dealing with the Egyptian attempt, but there is no doubt that this fence is not a simple one, and it is very concerning for us," Gaza sources told Ynet.

The tools to which the sources referred are Arab public pressure and Arab mediation attempts, which so far, do not seem to be having an impact on the Egyptian regime.

Lawsuits filed in Egyptian courts by a number of local bodies in hopes of having restraining orders issued against the construction of the fence also failed to hinder construction.

Sources in the Strip told Ynet they fear the fence may be just one part of the puzzle, which includes the renewal of the diplomatic process between Israel and the PA, as well as Israeli threats of military action in the Strip.

The Hamas movement realizes that one of the goals behind the construction of the fence is to make breaching the border more difficult. The organization is also following statements made by IDF officials on the continued armament of Palestinian organizations. Hamas believes the IDF is preparing the ground for military activity.

Anyone looking in on the occurrences both on the Palestinian side and the Egyptian side can see that in order to topple Hamas, joint Palestinian-Israel-Egyptian activity is required. For the first time, such cooperation seems to be underway.

Israel and Egypt are pushing via the blockade, and the Palestinian Authority may be part of a political process through which the international community may turn a blind eye to Israel's forceful defeat of Hamas, in order to restore PA leadership in the Strip.

Ynet has also learned that in the meantime, Egypt continues to boost activity in Egyptian Rafah in hopes of limiting the smugglers' step before they even make it to the Gaza border.

The Egyptian military demonstrates much presence in the area, in hopes of keeping elements that may harm efforts to deal with the smuggling away.

Gaza sources also wonder how much money Egypt received in exchange for damaging its own economy, which rolls in hundreds of millions of dollars per year from the goods smuggled to the Strip.

Prices in Gaza continue to rise by the day following steps taken against the smugglers and tunnel operators, as well as IDF threats to strike the tunnels.

"We are in a period similar to that before war, we are gathering and storing, and at much higher prices," Palestinians in the Strip told Ynet.