GENEVA -- Three of every four Palestinians live in poverty and their economy still depends on donors, despite 4.5 percent economic growth last year, the United Nations said on Wednesday.

The rise was fueled largely by agriculture and small businesses, which engage in ``forced import substitution'' because so few goods can get past Israel's tough blockade, said Raja Khalidi, a senior official at the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development.

But the increase in Gross Domestic Product follows two years of ``freefall'' since the outbreak of Israeli-Palestinian fighting in late 2000 and is unlikely to be sustained, Khalidi said.

``The fact that there was growth in 2003 is really a matter of bottoming out, not a rebound,'' he said, as he launched UNCTAD's annual report on the economic consequences of the conflict. ``Treading water is perhaps an apt metaphor,'' Khalidi later told the AP.

The Palestinian economy has been hit by Israeli roadblocks and closures, which have hampered commerce in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israel says the restrictions are needed to stop Palestinian suicide bombers and gunmen who have killed around a thousand Israelis. Around 3,000 Palestinians have died.

The World Bank has cited a 40 percent fall in Palestinian per capita GDP since the outbreak of violence, saying it far exceeds the impact of the Great Depression in the United States.

``The Palestinian economy is being transformed into one of subsistence,'' said Khalidi.

Average income among the 3.5 million Palestinians fell from $1,750 a year in 1999 to $1,040 last year. Overall, 72 percent of Palestinians live below a poverty line of $3.60 a day.

Some 127,000 Palestinians used to work in Israel, providing vital income for many families. But under security restrictions the number has slumped to 53,000.

Around 277,000 Palestinians are unemployed, from a 792,000-strong work force, according to U.N. figures. The figure would be worse but for the Palestinian economy's ability to absorb many workers who used to have jobs in Israel, albeit at far lower wages, the report said.

Palestinian areas also rely on international aid to keep the economy afloat, Khalidi said. ``It's a crutch, and without that crutch (growth) is not sustainable,'' he said.

DUBAI (Reuters) - Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Wednesday that Palestinians should end a four-year-old revolt because it was spreading terrorism and hindering the creation of an independent Palestinian state. "It is time to end the uprising. We want a Palestinian state. The (U.S.) president wants the establishment of a Palestinian state for the Palestinian people which exists side by side with Israel," Powell told Arab satellite television Al Jazeera. His comments were translated into Arabic.

"This will only happen when terrorism ends. But the uprising has helped spread terrorism and has not accomplished anything during these years except adding to the deterioration of the Palestinian economic situation and the deterioration of living standards in general among Palestinians," he said.

Violence has spiralled on the heels of the fourth anniversary of the Palestinian revolt, which broke out following the visit of then Israeli opposition leader, now Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, to a sensitive Jerusalem holy site on Sept. 28, 2000.

"The uprising has prevented us from achieving progress in several peace plans," Powell said.

Last year, the Quartet of Middle East peace mediators -- the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations -- adopted the so-called "road map" peace plan calling for mutual steps toward an interim Palestinian state in 2005.

Ministers of the group said after a meeting last Wednesday that no significant progress has been made in implementing it.

With new upscale restaurants, bars, and theater, the West Bank city is undergoing a cultural revival.

Just a few minutes drive from Yasser Arafat's half-destroyed headquarters, Usama Khalaf's version of upscale Ramallah dining is taking off.

His restaurant called Darna occupies a grand renovated stone villa with high-ceilinged archways and a second-floor patio that draws scores of young Palestinians. It serves large dishes of innovative Middle Eastern fare, but, more importantly, offers fragments of normalcy, which has become so elusive during the past four years.

The $800,000 spent by the restaurateur to open Darna - where waiters sport snappy bow ties and tuxedo vests - represents more than a shrewd bid to attract the city's bourgeois; it signals a revival of the cultural scene that made Ramallah a cosmopolitan capital for Palestinians.

In recent months new eateries have opened and the city's offerings have expanded despite Israel checkpoints and military raids. For Khalaf, opening Darna was simultaneously the fulfillment of a life's dream and an act of political defiance.

"I had an obligation to my hometown," Khalaf says. "When they saw someone investing despite the closures and incursions, it gave people the willingness to stay."

In the 1950s under Jordanian rule, Arab vacationers would arrive in Ramallah from the Persian Gulf in the summer to savor the cool mountain breeze during the evening. Pleasant weather and pastoral surroundings earned the tiny city the nickname "the Bride of Palestine." When the West Bank came under Israeli control, the Arab citizens of Israel would overrun the city's hotels on the weekends. It boasted a thriving nightlife, which included the only jazz club in the West Bank.

Danny Jafar, the grandson of a Ramallah hotelier, opened the Sangrias restaurant during the first year of the fighting with just five tables and a menu featuring nachos and burritos.

During the four months of daily military curfews in the summer of 2002, word of mouth spread that Sangrias had remained open for journalists. Patrons desperate to break the monotony of the citywide lockdown surreptitiously found their way to the bar. "I used to open up when people would go home and the tanks would come out," Jafar says. "Lights would be off and curtains would be drawn, but there were people inside. It was a hangout."

Last month, Jafar opened a new lounge area out back and expanded Sangrias' capacity to 45 tables. On a recent Saturday night, recordings by American rapper 50 Cent played from a stereo in the courtyard and smoke from nargilla water pipes floated among diners under illuminated walnut trees.

"I could be at a funeral procession in the morning and I could be at a bar at night," said Sameh Katkhuda, an information technology consultant. "This isn't Ramallah. It's San Francisco."

Unlike other cities in the West Bank, Ramallah is a base for the Palestinian government, nonprofit organizations, and foreign diplomats, providing for a steady flow of disposable income. The international presence in the city of 21,000 (the population goes up to 250,000 if you count surrounding villages) has helped turn it into hub for cultural institutions. The Ramallah Cultural Palace, a state-of-the art auditorium that opened in July, has already hosted a film festival and a production of "Al-Fawanees," the first Palestinian musical.

"As an outsider, you would think that there's no place for cultural activities or a cultural life," says Rita Janssen, a UN official who is the director of the cultural palace. "But it seems to be more important to them than when you're living in peace and quiet."

Hours after a performance of "Al-Fawanees," both Ms. Janssen and casts members were dining at Darna, where 20-somethings wearing American athletic jerseys had gathered to lounge in the patio.

When the restaurant was featured on Israeli television news magazine, Ariel Sharon is said to have been "amazed" at the site of such an establishment, owner Khalaf recalled with satisfaction.

"We're not just suicide bombers. We don't love just blood," Khalaf said. "We have another face. Ultimately, we have a desire to live."

Ramallah - Lawyer Taghrid Dahshan has said that the life of her client Amna Mona was in danger after jailers in the Ramle prison for women savagely assaulted her.

The lawyer said that the jailers beat up Mona after she refused a prison administration order to strip in order to undergo bodily search.

Dahshan, describing the assault as extremely violent, said that one of the jailers tried to strangle Mona but another policeman prevented him.

Jailers tried to break Mona’s left arm when they started beating her while strapped to her bed, the lawyer said, adding that she saw big blue marks on Mona’s hands in addition to wounds in various parts of her body.

Dahshan noted that Mona was still suffering from another jailers’ attack a week ago when they sprayed poisonous gas directly in her face causing her severe headaches.

In a statement taken under oath, Mona said that the jailers, after beating her up, shackled both her feet and hands then dragged her on the ground injuring her head in the process. She was hospitalized for treatment from those injures.

The lawyer noted that Mona retaliated to those attacks by declaring a hunger strike since last Sunday and added that the other female internees joined her.

The prison administration infuriated by the strike broke into the detainees’ cells and assaulted them before isolating a number of them in solitary confinement.

The Zionist occupation authorities detain 74 Palestinian women in harsh detention conditions.

A Zionist military court found Mona guilty a few days of assisting in the slaying of a Zionist young settler when she lured him into a rendezvous in Ramallah over two years ago via the Internet where two Fatah activists shot him down.

Nablus - Israeli occupation forces yesterday beat up a Palestinian reporter working with the American news agency the Associated Press for taking photos of soldiers while smashing Palestinian cars in the Salem town near Nablus.

The cameraman Majdi Eshtiye, 23, said that he saw four soldiers smashing the window shields of four Palestinian civilian cars at the Salem roadblock to the east of Nablus and took photos of the incident.

However, the soldiers saw him and started beating him. They damaged his camera and films then dragged him into their jeep and put his head on the jeep's heated engine.

Eshtiye said that he headed to the town’s clinic after the soldiers released him to treat his burns.

The American news agency protested the practice and asked the concerned “Israeli” parties to investigate the case.

Nazareth - Palestinian legal sources in the 1948 occupied areas have warned that Palestinian juvenile prisoners in the Zionist Talmund prison were suffering from very bad imprisonment conditions.

Lawyer Khaled Zabarqa, affiliated with the Mizan legal society, said that international human rights organizations should act to end the oppression of those juveniles.

He quoted detainees as saying that they were suffering from humiliation and inappropriate detention conditions. They said that each three of them were locked up in one cell that contained only two beds.

The detainees said that meals offered to them were very bad in quality and quantity and had very bad smells but they were forced to eat them because there was no other alternative.

The detainees said that they were penalized for the most trivial reasons and frequently fined. Furthermore, they were deprived of family visits, the lawyer quoted them as saying.

The detainees asked Zabarqa to appeal on their behalf for an immediate international legal and humanitarian interference to improve their conditions.

Occupied Jerusalem - A legal center concerned with affairs of Jerusalemites has condemned the Jewish racist attack against the house of Taleb Abu Hidwan at dawn yesterday.

The Quds center expressed utter dismay at the fact that the Zionist police did nothing to stop the attack or punish the culprits.

Abu Hidwan told the center that a group of Jewish settlers threw stones at his two-story house, damaged his property and punctured tires of cars parked in the vicinity.

He said that such attacks always occurred whenever those settlers were celebrating a certain occasion and added that Zionist police never punished any of those settlers despite his repeated complaints.

The center charged that the recurrent Jewish attacks at Abu Hidwan's house were deliberated with the aim of forcing the family leave their house.

The occupation administration of the holy city of Jerusalem was adding other pressures on the family threatening to demolish their second floor, which the family built to accommodate the big number of its members that reached 25 individuals.

The family members affirmed that they had concluded all necessary procedures for building the second story but they were surprised with a municipality notification recently that the area was not allowed construction permits!

The same family was the target of a similar attack a couple of days ago during the so-called Jewish celebration of the New Hebrew Year when a group of Jewish criminals beat up a number of the family members.