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.”

Since Israel secretly deported over 1,000 Sudanese refugees several months ago, sending them back to Sudan and threatening to deport hundreds more Sub-Saharan African refugees, Israeli authorities have suspended this practise in the face of international outrage and condemnation by the United Nations.

Yet refugees, even legal ones, nevertheless continue to leave in fear of deportation as well as abuse amid a climate of racism and frequent attacks against African refugees in Israel.

“We are subjected to verbal abuse and sometimes physical assaults,” Mulus Arafni, 30, a student from Asmara, Eritrea who has been in Israel two and a half years, told IPS. “We can’t work freely and are forced to live hand to mouth. Because of having to work illegally, sometimes the employers refuse to pay us.”

Still, in some ways the situation has improved, Sharon Harel from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), told IPS. “While in theory there has been no official change in the deportation policy of Sub-Saharan refugees from Israel, in practise the deportations of Sudanese has ceased and to date no forcible repatriation of Eritreans has taken place,” she explained.

“However, we are continuing to monitor events and are meeting regularly with members of the Israeli government,” Harel added. “Our efforts are focusing on helping the government to establish a proper procedure where refugees have access to a fairer system and are made aware of their rights.”

No rights for refugees

In February, Israeli media exposed the mass deportation of Sudanese refugees to their home countries and to third countries. Refugees were being pressured to sign deportation forms or face at least three years’ detention without access to due process.

While Israeli authorities claimed the refugees signed forms “voluntarily”, the UNHCR demanded an explanation and lambasted the claim, stating the deportations had taken without its knowledge and without it being consulted to supervise the process.

“The refugee claims were not examined. [Nor] were the refugees told they had the right to challenge the deportations,” Harel told IPS, adding most of the refugees were already in prison, many for at least six months and others for several years.

“They don’t receive full access to the refugee apparatus, and when there’s no access to the refugee apparatus that can lead to their release, then there is no voluntary return,” Harel explained.

An Israeli Interior Ministry committee subsequently advised the Israeli government to ignore a demand from UNHCR for an explanation.

Illegal deportations

For years Israeli authorities have known UNHCR’s position on Israel’s systematic deportation of refugees. Michael Bavli, a senior adviser to UNHCR, told the head of Israel’s Immigration Administration in 2008 that “deporting Sudanese to Sudan would be the gravest violation possible of the refugee convention that Israel has signed – a crime never before committed”.

Sudan defines Israel as an enemy country and has warned that it will punish any of its citizens who set foot in Israel. Consequently, human rights groups have said, deportation constitutes a violation of Israel’s most basic obligations under international law. According to the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention, to which Israel is a signatory, Sudanese and Eritrean citizens cannot be deported from Israel.

“In deporting people to Sudan, Israel [crosses] a red line and is not only violating its most basic obligation under international law, but demonstrating cruelty, hard-heartedness and indifference to the fate of human beings,” Assaf, the Aid Organisation for Refugees and Asylum Seekers, said in a statement.

In addition to stating that the refugees had been “voluntarily” sent out of the country, Israeli authorities also claimed to be protecting the interests of the refugees by sending them to a third country where they wouldn’t face persecution from authorities in their own countries.

T.H., an Eritrean army deserter, feared persecution and imprisonment if he returned to Eritrea. After being arrested, T.H. was given the choice of “volunteering” to be sent to Uganda or being incarcerated for three years.

Upon arrival in Uganda he was refused entry and forcibly flown to Cairo, where he was detained until Israeli authorities relented, under pressure from Israel’s attorney general, allowing him to return to Israel.

Despite the improvement in the situation, many Sub-Saharan refugees remain tense about their prospects in Israel. In interviews with IPS, several Eritreans were reluctant to talk, refused to have their photos taken, and answered questions quickly before hurrying away.

“I don’t want to stay in Israel but I’m afraid to return home,” Brihani Gazay, 24, also a student from Asmara told IPS. “Who do we turn to when we have problems?”

A quiet diplomatic war is being waged by several European governments against the Israeli authorities, specifically the Israeli Civil Administration which controls the Israeli occupied West Bank.

At stake is the destruction of a humanitarian project funded by a number of European governments, international organisations and foundations, worth approximately half a million euros and years of voluntary manpower hours put in by Israelis and Palestinians. Should the destruction go ahead more than a thousand Palestinians will be without electricity, and their livelihood would be decimated.

Community Energy Technology in the Middle East (Comet) has been providing free hybrid solar and wind renewable energy services to off-grid Palestinian communities in the southern West Bank since 2006.

The joint Palestinian-Israeli organisation was founded by two Israeli physicists, Elad Orian and Noam Dotan, who wanted to do something to counter the destructive nature of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian West Bank.

To date Comet has built 22 electricity installations in 22 communities, providing electricity to more than 1,500 Palestinian farmers, shepherds and their families who live in the arid southern West Bank eking out a living with non-mechanised agriculture and herding.

The Palestinian West Bank is divided into three areas. Area A is nominally under Palestinian control, and Area B, under joint Palestinian and Israeli control. Area C, comprising 62 percent of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is under exclusive Israeli control and primarily set aside for the more than 500,000 illegal Israeli settlers who live in several hundred settlements and outposts.

“Palestinian communities are deliberately disconnected from road, electricity, water and sewerage infrastructure by the Israeli authorities who want to keep Area C exclusively for Israeli settlements,” Comet’s organisational development manager Aya Shoshan tells IPS.

Comet’s project has been funded to the tune of approximately half a million euros donated by a number of European governments, specifically Germany, and by international organisations and foundations. The building of the electricity installations has taken three to four years of work, much of it voluntary labour by Israeli and Palestinian volunteers.

“About a year ago we started receiving demolition orders from the Israeli Civil Administration. Currently 10 electricity installations are under threat of destruction. This would cut more than a thousand Palestinians off from electricity,” Shoshan tells IPS.

“Israel as the occupying power is responsible for the welfare of Palestinians living under occupation under international law. Not only is Israel not fulfilling this responsibility but it has threatened to destroy a humanitarian project, funded by international donors, seeking to alleviate the hardships of these Palestinian communities.”

In response to the threats by the Israeli Civil Administration, Comet has embarked on a diplomatic outreach to save their project. This has included visits from diplomatic missions and delegations and appeals to high-level European officials and parliamentary members. Comet has also undertaken legal action as well as getting the international media involved.

“The German government, a significant donor, has put pressure on the Israeli authorities not to proceed with the demolitions as have several other European donors, and we are sure this is why there has been a temporary halt to carrying out the destruction of the electricity installations. But the threat is still there,” says Shoshan.

The morning that IPS visited the Gawa’is village in Masafer Yatta, officials from the Israeli Civil Administration arrived shortly after a warning that a demolition was about to be carried out. The presence of an Israeli film crew was possibly persuasive in the “stay of execution”.

Comet’s electricity installations have improved the lives of the Palestinians and their families immeasurably, and boosted the local economy by about 70 percent.

“Instead of having to sell their perishable produce, including cheese and butter, immediately by making individual trips to nearby towns, they can now refrigerate their produce, making a single trip and selling it in bulk,” says Shoshan.

Butter and cheese production has also increased by 15 percent due to the introduction of an electric churn. Previously it took two women hours to produce butter and cheese by hand. The use of cold water has further improved the efficiency of separation, with the farmers able to charge 50 percent more for the end product than previously.

The lives of women have changed for the better as they are the ones responsible for the dairy production. Clothes are now washed with washing machines. With their menfolk out in the field during the day they now have more free time to watch TV and listen to the radio. Children can do homework at night by light instead of by candlelight.

“For the first time in my life I feel like a human being,” says Ali Awad from Tuba village. “Can these minimal infrastructures constitute a threat of any sort to Israel?”

In an extraordinary move, a civilian has been sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for posting a picture on Facebook of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas dressed in a Real Madrid soccer outfit and kicking a ball. The sentencing is among several instances of a targeting of media in Palestinian areas.

Anas Saad Awad, 26, from the northern West Bank village of Awarta near Nablus, was sentenced in the Nablus magistrate’s court, that convicted him of “criticising the government.” Awad was unable to address the court as the conviction was carried out while he was elsewhere in the court building.

Awad’s lawyer Rima Al Sayed said her client has been accused of photo-shopping a picture of Abbas wearing a Real Madrid shirt with the caption: ‘A new striker’. According to Sayed, the Palestinian judiciary had applied Article 195 of Jordan’s penal code, which criminalises criticism of the Jordanian king.

The use of Jordanian law by Palestine’s judiciary is not unusual. In addition to the Basic Law established in 2002, Palestinian law is an amalgam of Egyptian and Jordanian law and the codes left over from the era of the British Mandate. But the application of Jordanian law can frequently be used against Palestinians in labour disputes and “honour” crimes and speech.

“My son only commented on Facebook,” said Awad’s distressed father. “You know how young people comment. He didn’t mean to insult the president. I ask the president to intervene personally to cancel the court’s decision.”

IPS was unable to speak to the family directly considering the likelihood of Palestinian intelligence agencies monitoring the family’s phones, and creating more trouble for them.

Awad had been in trouble with Palestinian intelligence previously for criticising the Palestinian Authority (PA), and he was arrested but then fined and released.

“This is unprecedented. This is the first time this kind of sentence has been imposed on an ordinary citizen merely for commenting on Abbas. The Facebook comment was not even rude or critical,” said Riham Abu Aita from the Palestinian Centre for Development and Media Freedoms (MADA).

“Last year 10 Palestinian journalists from Gaza and the West Bank were arrested and interrogated for criticising both Hamas and the PA. Media freedom in the Palestinian territories has got off to a bad start in 2013 already,” Abu Aita told IPS.

“Hamas has arrested dozens of journalists in Gaza, and the Israeli security forces are increasingly targeting both Palestinian and foreign media as they have tried to cover the growing protests in the West Bank.

“However, the PA has become overly sensitive in the last few months. This is related to its hyper sensitivity to international criticism following its upgrade at the UN to non-member observer status and the pressure being exerted on it by Palestinian and international human rights organisations,” said Abu Aita.

One of the PA’s strategies towards implementing its goal of an independent Palestinian state is joining the International Criminal Court (ICC) as a way of bringing pressure to bear on Israel, which is in violation of a number of human rights issues under international law over its treatment of Palestinians.

The PA’s status at the UN is only that of a non-observer state, but it could ratify core human rights treaties including the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) – Article 19 of which guarantees freedom of expression.

The PA has pledged to uphold human rights and ratify various conventions, but has failed to do so in a number of areas. Human Rights Watch noted that “it’s commendable that the Palestinian leadership is studying the treaties; its delay in ratifying them inspires little faith in their commitment to upholding fundamental rights and freedoms.”

“Another issue is the fear of the PA of a popular uprising in the West Bank following the Arab Spring which has swept through the region, threatening dictatorships in its wake,” Abu Aita told IPS. “Abbas’s government would also like to appear to be taking the higher moral ground in regard to Hamas which has recently been slammed in the press for its crackdown on the media in Gaza.”

While Abbas’s security apparatus has been able to control journalists and media publications in the West Bank to a certain extent, social networks have proven far harder to control despite intensive monitoring.

Last year Palestinian security forces jailed at least three people accused in separate incidents of criticising the government on social networking websites. A Palestinian university lecturer was one of those detained for insulting Abbas on Facebook .

Ironically while the PA has encouraged Palestinians to report on corruption, in April last year blogger Jamal Abu Rihan was arrested for launching a Facebook campaign demanding an end to corruption.

Ma’an News agency has uncovered evidence of the blocking of eight websites critical of Abbas, while columnist Jihad Harb was imprisoned for two months on charges of libel and slander for raising questions about cronyism within Abbas’s office.

“However, the PA’s efforts to crush journalistic dissent is backfiring,” Abu Aita said. “What we are finding is that Palestinian journalists are becoming stronger supporters of media freedom and more determined to support it the more they are targeted and harassed.”

Molotov cocktails, clouds of teargas, live gunfire, ambulance sirens wailing as they ferried the wounded, and round after round of rubber-coated metal bullets exploding in the street…these were familiar scenes in Palestinian protest.

The protestors, supported by Israeli and international activists, were in a campaign that began Friday last week to open Shuhada Street in Hebron in the southern West Bank to Palestinian pedestrians, motorists and businesses.

Following the shooting of 29 Palestinian worshippers in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron’s old city in 1994 by Israeli-American settler Baruch Goldstein from the Kiryat Arba settlement, Israeli authorities banned Palestinian motorists from accessing Shuhada Street, Hebron’s main commercial hub. The city’s Palestinian population was placed under months of continued curfew, while heavily armed Israeli settlers roamed the streets freely.

At the beginning of the second Intifadah in 2000, the Israeli military also banned Palestinian pedestrians from accessing the street, allegedly for the protection of approximately 800 Israeli settlers, illegally ensconced in the city, and surrounded by approximately 200,000 Palestinians.

The Israeli authorities also forcibly closed over 500 Palestinian businesses, economically decimating the Palestinian population and their dependents. Several years of almost permanent curfew, exacerbated by checkpoints, settler violence and clashes forced another 15,000 Palestinian residents to leave the city and hundreds more shop owners to close their businesses.

Today the formerly lively old city centre largely resembles a ghost town, with deserted streets and shuttered doors, imprisoned by a matrix of barbed wire, concrete barriers, and checkpoints manned by Israeli soldiers. The accompanying friction with the local population regularly leads to arrests, shooting injuries and deaths.

Muhamad Mohtaseb, 22, runs a souvenir shop on Shuhada Street. His shop stands isolated in the deserted street as Israeli settlers walk past and soldiers monitor movement.

Mohtaseb is one of the few Palestinian shop owners who resisted the political and economic pressures to close his shop, but his business has been strangled, forcing him to explore other commercial ventures as his family battles to survive.

“Before the second Intifadah we had lots of tourists coming here, and they were a major source of income. But tourists are now afraid to come here as they think it is dangerous. Palestinians, who comprised our other main source of revenue, are not allowed to walk on this street,” Mohtaseb told IPS.

“My family used to make 300 euros daily and now we are down to 20-30 euros a day if we are lucky. I’m married with a son and I also support my brothers, sisters and parents. I was forced to stop my education and couldn’t go to university because of our financial situation.

“I’m now trying to open a tourist travel business so that we can survive as there are some internationals who are interested in alternative tourism and seeing for themselves what is happening here,” said Mohtaseb.

“But it’s not only the economic situation that is the problem. As one of the few Palestinian shop owners who refused to close down and move away under pressure, I’m often a target for abuse from Israeli settlers who swear, spit at, threaten and sometimes physically abuse me,” Mohtaseb told IPS.

Just around the corner is a tiny grocery store belonging to Izhak Kahsha, 45, father of three children, who ekes out a hand-to-mouth living from local Palestinians. In order to get there one has to cross through several Israeli checkpoints with turnstile barriers.

Like Mohtaseb, Kahsha’s business has been decimated by the closure and restrictions. “Many of my customers used to come here and buy in bulk because they could drive home with the groceries. Now because vehicles are forbidden from coming near and people avoid the area because of the tensions I have to rely on a few customers who buy only enough to carry by hand,” Kahsha told IPS.

Zlikhah Mohtaseb, in her late forties, and her 75-year-old mother were forced to move to one of the houses overlooking Shuhada Street in 2006 for financial reasons. Zlikhah showed IPS the cage that surrounds her home.

“Due to settlers continually stoning the windows I asked the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee to assist me in installing iron grating on the side of the house overlooking the street for some protection. It has not stopped the attacks, however,” said Zlikha.

Israeli rights group B’tselem says, “Like other residents still living on the street, Zlikhah and her mother are forced to enter and leave their home by climbing a steep flight of stairs that serves as a side entrance. As they are forbidden to walk on the main street, they must take circuitous routes and go through two checkpoints in order to reach the mosque.”

In April 2007, following reports in the Israeli media and public pressure on the issue, Israel’s Civil Administration began to issue temporary permits to some Palestinians living on the street. In 2005, the Hebron Municipality and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel petitioned Israel ‘s High Court of Justice to open the street to Palestinian movement.

The state in response said the street has been closed by mistake and that Palestinians would be allowed to walk on the street, although restrictions on businesses and vehicular traffic would remain. However, Shuhada Street remains closed to Palestinians.