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.”

Seven al-Qaida-inspired guerrillas surrendered Tuesday to a secular Palestinian faction at a besieged refugee camp in northern Lebanon, offering the first tangible sign that moderate Palestinians might be moving against the militants.

But others in the extremist group Fatah Islam continued to fight, and Lebanese government troops battered their hideouts in the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp for a fifth straight day. Clouds of smoke billowed over the camp as artillery shells exploded on militant positions.

Calm held at Lebanon's biggest Palestinian refugee camp, Ein el-Hilweh in the south, where Islamic extremists sympathetic to Fatah Islam clashed with Lebanese soldiers Sunday night and Monday morning. The camp's 65,000 residents remained on edge, fearing combat could erupt again.

Many people worry the fighting could spread to more of Lebanon's 12 camps for Palestinians, which are riven with the factional rivalries that have brought violence to the Gaza Strip.

The surrender by seven militants at Nahr el-Bared was the first time a major Palestinian group _ in this case the Fatah movement led by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas _ responded to calls by Lebanese authorities to campaign against Fatah Islam since fighting broke out May 20.

It coincided with Abbas' renewed denunciation of the group, whose few hundred members embrace al-Qaida-style militancy and doctrine and are suspected of having links to Osama bin Laden's network.

Fatah Islam has nothing to do with the Palestinians, Abbas said in a speech in the West Bank marking 40 years of Israeli occupation. He accused the militants of "abusing the camps" to carry out attacks on the Lebanese army and "endangering the lives of Palestinians."

The seven Fatah Islam members came over to Fatah positions in the southern parts of Nahr el-Bared, handed over their weapons and pledged to stay out of the fight, said a Fatah commander, Maj. Gen. Khaled Aref.

Speaking from his base at the Ein el-Hilweh camp in the southern city of Tyre, Aref told The Associated Press that Fatah was trying to persuade Palestinians at Nahr el-Bared who sided with the militants to abandon the fight because the battle is wrecking their homes.

Major Palestinian factions have been trying to mediate an end to the battle. The government wants the militants to surrender, but Fatah Islam leaders have vowed to fight to death.

Despite their tacit backing for the army's offensive at Nahr el-Bared, mainstream Palestinian groups are wary of military involvement because of their own rivalries and the fear that direct intervention could spread the violence to other Palestinian camps.

Lebanese security officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to make statements to media, said Nahr el-Bared had been divided into three zones _ one under army control, another held by Fatah Islam and a third controlled by Palestinian civilians and guerrillas of Fatah and other factions who refused to give militants sanctuary.

A senior Lebanese military official said the army was tightening the noose around the militants, silencing gun positions and cleaning bomb-rigged buildings. The officer, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said he was not aware of any Fatah Islam militants surrendering to Lebanese troops.

More than 100 people have been reported killed in the fighting, the worst internal violence since the end of Lebanon's 1975-90 civil war.

Among the dead were 45 soldiers, including 10 killed since the military launched its offensive Friday at Nahr el-Bared and two who died in the clashes at Ein el-Hilweh. About 60 Fatah Islam militants were believed killed.

At least 20 civilians have been reported dead at Nahr el-Bared, but any recent civilian casualties were unknown. Most of the camp's 31,000 residents have fled, but about 5,000 remained.

The International Red Cross said Tuesday it managed to send in some medical supplies to the southern part of Nahr el-Bared for the first time since the offensive began.

The Red Cross evacuated 12 people, including one who was wounded and a pregnant woman, said spokeswoman Virginia de la Guardia. That followed the evacuation of 33 people Monday.

The London-based human rights watchdog Amnesty International said it was "greatly concerned" about civilians trapped in Nahr el-Bared who are being exposed to "grave risk."

A visiting U.S. official reiterated Washington's support for Lebanon. Kristen Silverberg, assistant secretary of state for international organizations, said after meeting with Prime Minister Fuad Saniora that the Lebanese "can be proud of the courage and determination" of the army.

The U.S. has flown in ammunition and other supplies for the Lebanese army in its showdown with Fatah Islam. And U.S. Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman announced Tuesday that the U.S would contribute $3.5 million to help Nahr el-Bared's residents.

Beddawi Refugee Camp, Lebanon -- The fear of lice spreading through this crowded Palestinian refugee camp, where taking a shower has become a luxury, sent 250 boys and men scurrying to get their hair cut.

Beddawi already was cramped before refugees from the nearby Nahr el-Bared camp began packing into schools and mosques and moving in with relatives here.

About 25,000 people have fled nine days of fighting between the Lebanese army and Fatah Islam militants holed up in Nahr el-Bared.

Most have fled to Beddawi, compounding the misery of the 18,000 refugees previously here.

Halimeh Salim al-Najjar was one of the 39 people sharing a classroom where desks had been piled up to serve as shelves.

"Our life is miserable here although it's better than Nahr el-Bared," he said. "The shelling was terrifying. We have lived through several wars but this was the worst."

The violence that began on May 20 has killed 20 civilians, 31 Lebanese soldiers and up to 60 militants.

Mariam Hamed, who is sharing another classroom with her three sisters and other families, said she hasn't showered or changed her clothes in five days.

"We the poor have no one to help us but God," she said, bursting into tears.

With conditions deteriorating and no end in sight to the standoff, relief organizations have scrambled to provide relief, fearing the camp could become an easy target for disease.

The Beirut-based Islamic Charitable Reform and Guidance Association rounded up barbers on Sunday to cut hair to keep lice from spreading, and placed showers and battery-operated lamps in classrooms that have been converted into apartments.

The U.N. agency that oversees Palestinian refugees has distributed about 4,000 mattresses, 3,500 pillows, 3,500 blankets and 1,040 hygiene kits, most of them to people in Beddawi.

"No camp can tolerate" such a sudden influx, Karen Koning AbuZayd, commissioner-general for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, said Sunday after touring Beddawi. "We need to make sure everyone has a place to stay, a shelter, has food, has water."

About 400,000 Palestinian refugees live in Lebanon, including those who left after Israel's creation in 1948 and their descendants. About half live in poverty in 12 refugee camps that are like small towns, with two- or three-story buildings on narrow streets alongside mosques, schools and businesses.

Othman Badr, a former Nahr el-Bared resident, says he is one of the lucky ones. His brother lives in Beddawi and he, his wife and their seven children _ along with another family _ were able to move into his brother's apartment instead of staying in a classroom or mosque.

Badr said he has to stand in line to use the bathroom and can shower only once every three days. But he acknowledges his situation could be a lot worse.

"If you compare us to others displaced, we are living in a five-star hotel," he said. "There are more catastrophic cases here."