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.”

A top Greek air force official has revealed that Greece participated in two major military exercises over the Mediterranean Sea with Israel in recent weeks as test runs for possible long-range strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities.

News of a secret exercise was broken by the New York Times last Friday, citing U.S. officials as saying that more than 100 Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighter jets took part in preparation for long-range strikes in the first week of June.

But in Athens, an official with the Greek air force's central command confirmed to Agence France-Presse the substance of the U.S. media report, while stating that it had taken part in not one, but two "joint training exercises" with Israel off the Mediterranean island of Crete.

The manouvers, code-named "Glorious Spartan 08," took place on May 28 and June 12, and consisted of aerial exercises and knowledge exchange, said the Greek source who requested anonymity.

U.N. atomic watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei responded to the U.S. media report by warning that an attack on Iran would turn the region into a fireball and that he would resign as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

"A military strike [against Iran] would in my opinion be worse than anything else.... It would transform the Middle East region into a ball of fire," ElBaradei said in an interview with Al-Arabiya television.

ElBaradei said any attack would simply harden Iran's position in its row with the West over its nuclear program, which he said did not pose an "imminent risk" of proliferation given the current status of the program.

"A military strike would spark the launch of an emergency program to make atomic weapons, with the support of all Iranians, including those living abroad," he said.

But Tehran discounts the threat of an Israeli strike by flatly rejected it as "impossible."

The West fears that Tehran could use uranium enrichment to make an atomic bomb although Tehran insists it only wants nuclear technology for peaceful energy purposes.

Also in Tehran Monday an aide to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed that the president had been the target of an assassination plot at the U.N. food summit in Rome earlier this month.

Ahmadinejad last week himself spoke of a purported murder plot in Iraq in March – an announcement greeted with astonishment in some sections of the local press – but this is the first time a conspiracy has been linked to his Italy trip.

"The actions of the president over the three previous years have endangered the illegitimate interests of many people in Iran and outside," said the aide, Ali Zabihi, according to the Fars news agency.

"That is why some people have thought of eliminating or assassinating the president," added Zabihi, who was described as Ahmadinejad's adviser for human resources.

"But the plots to assassinate the president in Iraq and at the Food and Agriculture Organization conference failed, thanks to God," he said.

Ahmadinejad said on Thursday that enemies had planned to kidnap and kill him in Iraq but the plot was foiled after the Iranian delegation changed their travel plans.

According to Zabihi, the plots were "in line with the order given by [U.S. President George W.] Bush to kill Iranian leaders." He did not give further details.

Some moderate newspapers have challenged the validity of the president's allegations of an attempt on his life during the trip to Iraq, the first ever by an Iranian president.

"Why did the president wait three-and-a-half months before revealing such a thing?" asked the reformist daily Etemad Melli.

"As Mr. Ahmadinejad went to New York [for the U.N. General Assembly] wouldn't it have been simpler for the Americans to kidnap him on their own soil?" it noted.

The moderate daily Kargozaran wondered why no protest had been lodged with the Swiss Embassy in Tehran that looks after U.S. interests in the absence of an American mission.

"If the president's statements are not confirmed ... his attention should be drawn to the damaging consequences for the long-term interests of the country of using such means of propaganda," it added.

Democratic White House candidate Barack Obama on Thursday defended his remarks that Jerusalem should not be divided under any Israeli-Palestinian peace pact, saying a divided city would be "very difficult to execute."

A day after sparking outrage among Palestinians when he told a Jewish group that Jerusalem must remain the "undivided" capital of Israel, Obama told CNN that the issue is still up to the two sides.

"Obviously it's going to be up to the parties to negotiate a range of these issues. And Jerusalem will be part of those negotiations."

However, he said, "My belief is that as a practical matter it would be very difficult to execute.

"And I think that it is smart for us to work through a system in which everybody has access to the extraordinary religious sites in old Jerusalem."

But, he added, "Israel has a legitimate claim on that city."

On Wednesday Obama pledged to a meeting of the powerful Washington lobby American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) his "unshakeable commitment to Israel's security" if he is elected president in November, while making the statement that Jerusalem should remain undivided.

Leading Palestinians including president Mahmud Abbas condemned the remarks.

"Jerusalem is one of the files under negotiation. The entire world knows perfectly well that we will never accept a state without (east) Jerusalem (as its capital). That should be clear," Abbas said.

Obama, the Democrats' presumed nominee to contest the November presidential election, insisted that he also said things in his speech "that probably some Israelis aren't happy with," such as pointing out that the Jewish state's settlement policy "not been helpful to peace as well."

"We have to have a contiguous and cohesive Palestinian state that functions effectively," he told CNN.

"There are a whole host of areas where I think there's going to have to be compromise on both sides," he added.

He meanwhile took a jab at President George W. Bush for not actively pursuing an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal until this year, the final year in Bush's presidency.

"The Middle East peace process is so important that we can't reserve it to the end of a presidency.

"We've got to start soon and I'm going to be absolutely committed to making that happen" if elected president, Obama said.

A Palestinian militant was killed and an Israeli soldier was wounded in clashes Friday just inside Gaza following a deadly mortar attack on the Jewish state, medical and military officials said.

The member of the armed wing of Hamas died in an exchange of fire between militants and an Israeli military unit near the border, Gaza emergency medical services said.

Hamas, the Islamist movement that rules the impoverished territory, said in a statement its fighters had fired anti-tank rockets at the troops.

An Israeli military spokeswoman said a soldier was wounded when the gunmen fired at an engineering unit operating armoured bulldozers along the border.

Earlier at least 10 Palestinians were wounded in an Israeli air raid on a Hamas police post in the north of the Gaza Strip, Palestinian medics said.

The raid on a building in Beit Lahiya held by militiamen of the ruling Hamas movement claimed casualties among civilians, the emergency services said.

An Israeli army spokesman confirmed the raid, saying it had targeted "a Hamas position" and was in reply to a mortar attack that had killed an Israeli civilian on Thursday.

An Israeli worker was killed in a mortar attack by Gaza militants on Thursday, triggering an earlier air raid on the impoverished territory that left a four-year-old Palestinian girl dead.

The Israeli man was killed when two mortar rounds slammed into a kibbutz in southern Israel in an attack claimed by the armed wing of the Islamic movement Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip.

Israel on Monday hailed the late US congressman Tom Lantos, a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor who played a key role in rallying US support for the Jewish state.

Israel "expresses great sorrow" over the loss of the 80-year-old Lantos, who died earlier the same day from cancer of the esophagus, the foreign ministry said.

Lantos "was a leader in promoting Israeli-US ties in Congress. His commitment to human rights and the commemoration of the Holocaust were the pillars of his public work," it said.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that "Israel owes a great debt to Lantos for dedicating himself to promoting Israeli-US ties and his activities for the Jewish people."

Born in Budapest to a Jewish family in February 1928, Lantos was 16 when Nazi Germany occupied Hungary. As a teenager, he was a member of the anti-Nazi resistance and later of the anti-Communist student movement.

After the Soviets invaded Hungary, he discovered that most of his family had died in the Holocaust. By 1947, he was in the United States on an academic scholarship and became an economics professor in San Francisco.

He was elected to Congress in 1980 where he served as the chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Since the Democrats regained control of Congress in 2006 elections, Lantos used his committee to launch strident appeals for greater US action on human rights in China, Darfur, Myanmar and Russia.

Under his stewardship, the committee voted in October to describe the mass slaughter of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire as "genocide" -- plunging US relations with Turkey into crisis.