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 balding, bearded visage loomed over President Bush's visit here last week, peering down from banners and from posters on buses barreling along quiet streets. The face was that of Jonathan Pollard, an American who pleaded guilty in 1986 to passing top-secret information to Israel.

Israeli supporters seeking his release were rebuffed by President Bill Clinton during the last period of extended negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. Now they are ramping up their campaign for a presidential pardon.

"The political situation finally seems to favor freeing him," said Pollard's wife, Esther, a native of Canada who married him after he entered prison -- he is serving a life sentence -- and now lives in Jerusalem.

Pollard was on the unofficial agenda throughout Bush's visit. The case "came up" during day-long meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, according to Olmert's spokesman Mark Regev, who declined to provide further details.

Israel's deputy prime minister handed Bush letters from Esther Pollard and from a rabbi who heads a prominent religious party. And Bush's dinner companions included cabinet minister Rafi Eitan, Pollard's former spy handler and unindicted co-conspirator who is barred from traveling to the United States. Israeli news reports later quoted Eitan as saying there was "a chance" Pollard would soon be freed.

The White House has given no such indication. "There are no plans to change his status," said spokesman Gordon Johndroe. But with Israel sure to raise the issue again during the ongoing U.S.-brokered peace talks with the Palestinians, Pollard's supporters and some outside analysts say circumstances may favor a compromise. Bush may need to reward Israel for making concessions to the Palestinians, the theory goes, and many officials on whose watch Pollard spied are long-retired or dead.

"It is not hard to see a scenario in which Bush is pushing Olmert's government for more and more, and Olmert is under pressure to deliver something, and looking so weak that the government might fall because he is giving up too much. Then Bush can strengthen him by offering Pollard," said Avi Ben-Zvi, a University of Haifa political science professor and specialist on U.S.-Israeli relations.

Such a decision would surely infuriate the U.S. intelligence establishment, which in the past has spoken out strongly against a pardon. While Israel has never officially disclosed what it got from Pollard, who worked in naval intelligence, he is thought to have provided tens of thousands of pages of documents, much of the material highly sensitive. After years of denials, Israel in 1998 acknowledged that Pollard had been its agent.

That same year, during a summit between Israeli and Palestinian leaders held at Wye River, Md., Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu asked Clinton to pardon Pollard. Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet then threatened to resign, according to an account of the period in his book, "At the Center of the Storm," and Clinton turned down Netanyahu, who was furious because he thought he had a deal.

Through a spokesman, Tenet declined to comment for this article. Other published accounts of the period indicate that pardoning Pollard was very much on the table. In his book "Missing Peace," U.S. negotiator Dennis Ross wrote that he had advised Clinton to hold off on pardoning Pollard until negotiations on the final status of the Palestinian territories. "You will need it later, don't use it now," he recalled telling Clinton.

Intelligence experts said that although the names atop the intelligence agencies have changed since 1998, deep animosity toward Pollard remains. "For the rank and file, it remains a serious sore point," said the Brookings Institution's Bruce Riedell, who spent 29 years at the CIA and served as a negotiator at Wye River.

Asked about Bush pardoning Pollard, Riedell said that in 2001 Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made a request similar to Netanyahu's "and was told in no uncertain terms that this president would not interfere" in the case.

In the meantime, Pollard has remained a cause celebre here, perceived in some quarters as a Jewish patriot whose spying was intended to strengthen Israel, an American ally, rather than weaken the United States. Israel granted him citizenship in 1998.

Pollard's former lawyer, Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, who favors a full pardon, said that Bush has other options.

"Commuting the sentence to 25 years in prison is a very realistic option," Dershowitz said, adding that Pollard had been told when he agreed to plead guilty to espionage that the government would not seek a life sentence. "Since he's asking a lot from Olmert in terms of concessions, Bush could help the government keep that promise it made and broke, by making the sentence a term of years."

Esther Pollard said her husband's health has deteriorated in prison, which has included seven years in solitary confinement, and that he should be allowed to live out his years in Israel. "If anyone cares about justice, this should be done," she said. "I am optimistic."

With a pellet gun in his jeans pocket and a hammer in his hand, Dani Landesberg and a crew of teenage Jewish settlers began adding a second story to what has become their new home. They stole occasional glances down the winding access road in case the police came by to evict them, again.

Last Sept. 30, a dozen settlers moved into the small stone house at the base of a gentle hill in the northern West Bank and turned what was once a barn for donkeys into a synagogue. Two weeks later, Israeli security forces banished them for the first of eight times from land that a Palestinian family says is its property, a claim backed by legal documents and an Israeli human rights group.

The settlers returned the next day, so police sealed the windows and doors with metal siding and plowed a berm across the driveway, all to no avail.

"They can drag us away a hundred times and we'll come back," said Landesberg, 18, who like many religious Jews wears a yarmulke and long, curled sideburns. "And if the army wants to stay and guard it, then we win, because if the Israeli army is here, the land is being occupied by Jews."

In the incremental struggle for land in the West Bank, this "outpost," or Jewish settlement unauthorized by the Israeli government, and about 100 others like it, have emerged as a front line.

With a new round of peace talks underway, the Israeli government is under intense pressure to hand back parts of the occupied West Bank, starting with the outposts, according to the terms of the Bush administration's 2003 "road map," the basis for the current dialogue. First steps required of Palestinians include a halt to violent attacks on Israel.

On the eve of his visit to the region last week, President Bush called on Israeli leaders to "honor their commitments" and "get rid of unauthorized settlements." Palestinians say Israel's efforts thus far to remove outposts have been scattershot and insincere.

Settlers have responded to Bush's comments not by curtailing construction, but by expanding it.

Shvut Ami, which means "the return of our people," doesn't look like much. The settlers sleep five to a room, men separately from women, with only thin mattresses between them and the earthen floor. Decor consists of bumper stickers with slogans such as "Hebrew labor" and "No Arabs, no terror attacks." A few tattered Jewish Bibles sit on a lone shelf.

Ranging from a single hastily built plywood shack to full-scale communities for dozens of families, the outposts represent a provocative land grab by settlers seeking to expand their territory in the West Bank, which Israel captured during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

Sometimes they are described as a neighborhood, or offshoot, of a nearby government-authorized settlement. But often there is no Jewish community within a mile or more.

The Israeli government has authorized and funded scores of settlements in the West Bank over the years, where about 260,000 Jews now live. Under international law, it is illegal to settle land seized in war, and Palestinians say the settlements now pose one of the greatest obstacles to peace.

Israeli leaders dispute that assertion, although they have pledged to eliminate the outposts, which proliferated with the start of the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, in 2000. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert acknowledged recently that Israel is not meeting its obligations, and other officials have suggested that a crackdown could follow Bush's visit.

"Israel has an obligation under the road map to remove the remaining unauthorized outposts," said Mark Regev, a spokesman for Olmert. "We will be doing so, we are committed to do so, and work is already underway in order to bring about tangible action on this matter."

The inability to evacuate even small outposts like Shvut Ami fuels Palestinian claims that the Israeli government's efforts are mostly for show and demonstrates the difficulty Israel will have in meeting Bush's demand, particularly with regard to larger, more established outposts. During peace talks last week, settlers began work on at least three new outposts, according to Daniella Weiss, a longtime leader in the settler movement who recently delivered pots of hot soup to the settlers building Shvut Ami.

"We intend to ensure that Jews stay in Judea and Samaria, and the best way to do that is to establish more communities," said Weiss, using the biblical term for the West Bank favored by some Israelis. "The prime minister may be foolish enough to compromise, but the young generation will not. They don't even speak to the army when they come to remove them, because the army's job is to deal with Israel's enemies, not its citizens."

According to Weiss, at least 10 new outposts are under construction across the West Bank. On the day Bush arrived, the army destroyed one shanty-like structure at Netzer, near Bethlehem, and moved a large boulder to block the road leading into it, a rocky dirt track that can be traveled only by four-wheel-drive vehicles. But residents of a nearby settlement called Alon Shvut vowed the shanty would soon be rebuilt.

"I have six kids and they're all going to need places to live, so we have to keep expanding," said Hagay Yakutiel, 43, a lawyer who lives in Alon Shvut, as he trudged through the mud to survey what remained of Netzer: a few shattered sheets of plywood and some severed rubber pipes.

Palestinian leaders welcome the American pressure to remove the outposts. But some also worry that the focus on outposts, in which an estimated 3,000 Jews live, diverts attention from an issue they consider far more important: the government-sponsored settlements themselves.

"Definitely, the focus on outposts is a distraction from what we want to be talking about," said Mustafa Barghouti, a member of the Palestinian parliament who led an anti-Bush demonstration in Ramallah during the president's visit. "You have some little building with two people in it and the army comes in and destroys it, and then they say, 'See, we are doing what we said we'd do.' "

If Israeli officials were serious about removing outposts, Barghouti and others said, they would start with full-scale villages, like Migron, where 43 families inhabit dozens of white trailers atop a hill north of Jerusalem. In 2005, an official commission headed by Israel's former chief state prosecutor concluded that the entire settlement was built on privately owned Palestinian land -- and that half of all outposts have appropriated land belonging to Palestinians -- but the government has taken no action against it.

"Olmert is playing a game. In the Israeli way of thinking, Migron is hugely important. People would go crazy if they tried to take it down," said Yakutiel, the settler from Alon Shvut. "But they know they can get away with ruining places like Netzer, because so far, it's nothing."

Dror Etkes, who spent five years monitoring outposts for the Israeli advocacy group Peace Now, said the government is reluctant to take action because, while it officially describes the outposts as unauthorized, it has played a major role in planning, funding and encouraging some of them. Many draw power from the main Israeli grid and receive other public services, including water supply. A reporter attempting to enter Migron to speak with residents was turned away by an Israeli soldier posted outside the gate.

"It is a way of manipulating the situation," Etkes said. "They will say, 'This is not an outpost. It's just a new neighborhood for the outpost right over there.' Then all of a sudden, the neighborhood is bigger than the whole outpost was before."

But even smaller outposts such as Shvut Ami and Netzer must be abolished, Etkes said, because if left standing they could serve as precursors to larger development, as has happened often. Then there are the Palestinians with claims to the land on which the smaller outposts are built.

Two miles from Shvut Ami, across a highway and a craggy valley in the Palestinian village of Kufur Kadum, Badriya Amer, 54, said she can hardly bear to look out her window at what she says was once her home. In a tattered plastic bag she carries papers she says document her family's ownership, including surveying maps that depict a three-acre plot and the two stone buildings and a written deed dated March 1983 with her father's name printed on it.

The olive trees on the property provided more than 2,000 pounds of olive oil annually for her family until this year, when the settlers prevented them from harvesting the crop. "When we tried, they chased us away with guns," she said. Landesberg said his pistol is the sole weapon on site and fires only plastic pellets.

Amer is scheduled to appear in court in Tel Aviv on Jan. 22, to try to reestablish her right to the land. The Israeli human rights group Yesh Din is supporting her efforts. But she isn't optimistic. "I put my faith in God, not in courts, but I have no other option," she said.

Israeli forces launched military operations in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank early Thursday, hours before a Katyusha rocket fired from Gaza crashed down harmlessly near the Israeli city of Ashkelon.

At least nine Palestinians were killed during Israeli tank and helicopter attacks in Gaza, including five members of a family killed near the central city of Khan Younis, Palestinian officials said.

Israeli officials said the Katyusha attack was the deepest strike ever into Israel from Gaza. Katyushas are Soviet-designed rockets with a range of about a dozen miles, roughly twice the maximum distance flown by makeshift Palestinian rockets known as Qassams.

Israeli military officials said the operation in Gaza, which began just after midnight, was intended to counter Palestinian attacks and followed recent rocket strikes. Israeli soldiers also entered the northern West Bank city of Nablus in search of Palestinian fighters. The Katyusha was fired at about 8:30 a.m. Thursday, they said.

"What we've seen today is the beginning of a situation where it isn't just the adjacent communities in the firing line but up to a quarter of a million Israelis," said Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev. "Today's rocket attack represents an escalation, an upgrade, a bigger rocket with a longer range, not something homemade, but something smuggled into Gaza from outside."

Citing concern that more advanced weapons were being brought into Gaza, the Israeli government had one day earlier condemned Egypt's decision to open a border crossing for pilgrims returning from Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

The simultaneous Israeli operations were the most significant offensives in the Palestinian territories in more than two months, residents said.

In Nablus, Palestinian officials said 33 people were injured in clashes, some of them by rubber-coated steel bullets. Gunfire echoed and clouds of tear gas wafted throughout the city during much of the day. Three residents suspected of militant activity were arrested, an Israeli military spokesman said.

The violence occurred as President Bush prepared to visit Israel and the Palestinian territories in an attempt to build momentum toward peace.

"With President Bush coming so soon, one would hope to see positive steps toward the Palestinian people, but instead we see the opposite," said Jamal al-Muhaisen, governor of Nablus. While Nablus has long been considered a stronghold of militant groups launching attacks on Israel, the Palestinian Authority has intensified policing efforts there in recent months.

"I regard this incursion as an attempt to destroy our security plan, which was working," Muhaisen said.

Bush's visit is timed to build on November peace talks in Annapolis, Md. Those meetings included Israeli and Palestinian officials, but not representatives of the armed Islamic movement Hamas, which controls Gaza.

[Hamas said one Palestinian fighter was killed Friday in a clash with Israeli troops near the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, the Reuters news agency reported from Gaza City.]

The attack in Bani Suhailah, east of Khan Younis, killed Karima Fayad, her daughter Asma, 20, and sons Sami, 28, and Ahmed, 31, when tank shells struck their home. Israeli officials said the men had been shooting at Israeli forces before taking refuge in the house. Blood soaked the walls of the two-story home and olive trees in the back yard.

As the bodies were removed in white coffins, neighbors and relatives wailed and shouted, "There is no God but Allah!"

"I didn't get to say goodbye," cried Maria Fayad, who lost her stepmother and three siblings in the attack. Another Fayad relative died in clashes nearby. "How can they all be gone in one minute?"