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.”

Thanks to drought and increasing Israeli security restrictions on where they can wander, their nomadic lifestyle, which predates the birth of Christ, is likely to die out within a generation.

Lack of rainfall over the past three years, thought by some to be due to climate change, is gradually rendering many already sparse grazing lands unusable for their flocks of goats and sheep. At the same time, the steady growth of Jewish towns and settlements in the Israeli Negev desert and the West Bank has left the 280,000 Bedouin of the region with ever fewer options for moving to better pastures, their traditional way of surviving when times are hard.

"This is the worst dry year for the Bedouin," declared Suleiman al-Hathalin, standing among the ramshackle collection of tin shacks and tents that mark his family's land at Khirbet Umm al-Khair, an unrecognised Bedouin village in the West Bank hills south of Hebron. "My father and my uncle had the chance to live a true Bedouin life. But I am being deprived of this and now so are my children. The life of the Bedouin, the freedom of movement – it's finished."

At present, most Bedouin tribes are still stubbornly clinging on, spending what little money they have on artificial feed for their animals rather than succumbing to government pressure to resettle into towns with running water and electricity.

However, the International Committee of the Red Cross warns that a way of life that has survived wars, occupations, famines and calamities stretching back to Biblical times may be finally coming to end.

"Their lifestyle is under threat," said Helge Kvam, a spokesman for the committee's mission in Jerusalem. "They need to get better access to water and grazing sources. And at the end of the day, that requires a political solution."

With their camels, flowing robes and warm hospitality, the Bedouin have long been the symbol of life in the harsh desert, brought to fame as the desert warriors who guided Lawrence of Arabia during his First World War campaign against the Ottomans in the Middle East. Many can still pull out land deeds dating to the Ottoman Empire or at least the more recent British mandate, establishing their traditional territory, and historians say evidence of their existence here stretches back beyond the 11th century BC.

But modernisation is slowly overcoming their traditions, while their land claims have been eroded by years of war and development. Now, with the Bedouin forced to the margins of their historic territories and unable to roam freely, the continuing drought and rising food and fuel prices come as a crippling final blow.

Mr al-Hathalin's family has lived a traditional nomadic life for generations, housed in tents and rough shacks and moving from field to field with their sheep and goats as the seasons change. As recently as the 1950s and 1960s, they were comparatively well-off, with large herds of both sheep and camels.

Today, however, Mr al-Hathalin and about 80 members of his extended family support themselves with just 100 hardy goats and supplement their diet with United Nations food rations. Their home is a shanty village of tin shacks and tents, jammed against a fence separating them from a Jewish settlement nearby.

Two of their dwellings, one of concrete and another of tin, have been demolished by the Israeli army, which is trying to relocate them to another piece of land a few miles away.

Hemmed in by borders and checkpoints, they cannot move their goats to find better grazing, and the whole village relies on a trickling water supply from a single pipe. As a result, their animals are sickly and hungry, and their children go unbathed for weeks.

Bedouin in Israel do receive some support from the government, though state efforts to resettle them into eight official villages in the desert have led to high unemployment and social decay. A state committee is examining how to manage 45 other, unrecognised villages, which are under formal demolition orders and without running water or electricity. "Right now we are trying to do our best to help with many projects. We are investing a lot of money into this area, into schools and health care," said Dror Soroka, a programme manager with Israel's Ministry of Development in the Galilee and Negev, who defended the policy of resettlement.

"I truly believe the young people see what is happening in the world and they want to achieve a little more – they want to live in the world, they want a good education, they want better jobs," he said.

The Bedouin of the predominantly Palestinian West Bank, however, enjoy none of those efforts. Harassed by Jewish settlers from a radical settlement nearby, they are up against Israeli army orders to relocate them and demolish their decrepit homes. But as West Bank residents, they fall under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority, which offers no similar programmes.

Mr al-Hathalin's son, Eid, 23, wonders if he can continue in his father's footsteps. He is a high-school graduate who speaks the English he learned at school with a shy smile, but his family cannot afford any further education for him. But, although he carries a mobile phone and yearns for the money to buy a truck, he says he will not give up on his family's traditions. "Of course it's getting harder and harder. But we want to have hope," he said.

The SS Free Gaza and the SS Liberty, which are sailing from Crete to Cyprus and then on to Gaza after being delayed by a storm, will carry about 40 protesters campaigning against Israel's economic sanctions on the Palestinian territory, including an 84-year-old Holocaust survivor and Lauren Booth, sister-in-law of Tony Blair, who is the international special envoy to the Middle East.

The boats, which will also carry a cargo of balloons, musical instruments and thousands of hearing aids, are expected to approach Gaza early next week.

The territory's land borders have been closed to all but essential humanitarian aid for more than a year, plunging it into deep poverty, and the tiny strip of land is rarely visited by foreign dignitaries. An attempt by Mr Blair last month was aborted at the last minute due to security concerns.

Israeli officials are thought to see the protesters' efforts as a dangerous precedent. The foreign ministry sent a letter advising organisers that Gaza coastal waters are subject to a no-go warning from the Israeli navy and that any attempt to approach would be interpreted as assistance to a terrorist regime.

They have offered help in delivering humanitarian aid via land borders instead.

"From my point of view this is some kind of pirate ship," said Shlomo Dror, a defence ministry spokesman.

"You can demonstrate, that's OK with us. But you are not allowed to break international law."

Gaza has been subject to heavy economic sanctions since the Islamist militant group Hamas violently wrested control there in June 2007. Hamas has refused international demands to recognise Israel and renounce violence.

Though shipments have increased under the terms of a ceasefire with Israel, shortages of many basic goods continue and a United Nations report last month found Gaza now has the world's highest unemployment rate, at 45 per cent.

Organisers from the Free Gaza movement, who raised £150,000 for their mission to challenge the blockade, maintain Israel has no right to stop the boats. But they acknowledge they are likely to be intercepted by the Israeli navy and detained, and have already contacted consular officials and lawyers in Israel.

Defence officials say unauthorised vessels would normally be escorted to official seaports at Ashdod or Haifa.

"We hope that the Israeli government will have some wisdom. To drag us in and arrest us and say somehow we are a danger is absurd," said, Greta Berlin, one of the organisers who is in Cyprus, where the boats are expected to dock before continuing to Gaza over the weekend.

"Of course we're going to make a point. Gaza has the right to have its own seashore ... We intend to break the siege."

Under the 1993 Oslo Accords, Israel retained military control of Gaza's territorial waters but agreed to allow fishing boats within 20 nautical miles. Today fishing is permitted only within about three nautical miles and boats that venture further risk Israeli fire.

The highly controversial journey, announced earlier this summer, has already been delayed several times because of bad weather. Participants, including Ms Booth, say they have received death threats for their efforts.

"An anonymous young man called my home in France as my daughters played hide-and-seek in the garden," Ms Booth wrote on her blog.

"This stranger spoke to my husband, warning him that 'your wife is in great danger. These ships will be blown up.' My husband asked how it was this person had obtained our private home number.

"No response was forthcoming but the illicit threats carried on."

The Israeli army has followed up on only three per cent of its own orders to demolish illegal buildings in Jewish settlements in the West Bank over the last decade, a study says.

The report by Peace Now, an Israeli settlement watchdog, follows pledges by the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, to freeze new construction in settlements.

Israel also faces increasing pressure to dismantle illegal outposts in preparation for negotiations toward the founding of a Palestinian state.

Based on Israeli army statistics, the report shows that the army carried out only three per cent of its own demolition orders in the last decade, or 107 of 3,449 orders. Another 171 structures were evacuated.

"We've had so many declarations, and none of these declarations have ever happened. What we want to see today is action," said Hagit Ofran, Peace Now's settlement watch director, who said dozens of illegal outposts and new construction projects falling outside this report have also been largely ignored by authorities.

"In order to have real peace negotiations, you must make sure that on the ground you do whatever you can to move forward."

The illegal structures listed for demolition included industrial buildings, mobile-phone towers, public offices and army installations as well as caravans and houses for settlers, and centred around the fast-growing settlements of Beit El and Ofra, north of Jerusalem, the report found.

Jewish settlements are one of the most complicated and controversial issues facing Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, who are to meet again December 12 after last week's summit in Annapolis, Maryland.

The Palestinians want a state based on Israel's pre-1967 borders, while the Israelis have previously stated their intentions to keep three major settlement blocs that fall inside their 436-mile security barrier of electronic fencing and concrete slabs, still under construction.

Israel committed in 2003 under the US-backed "road map" for peace to stop building new settlements and to dismantle unauthorised outposts, and Mr Olmert has pledged to stick to a freeze on new settlements.

But last week, the Israeli defence minister, Ehud Barak, said it would be impossible "from a legal point of view to stop construction projects that have been ongoing for years."

The Israeli army's civil administration for the West Bank yesterday disputed Peace Now's numbers, arguing they didn't account for nearly 600 structures which tenants dismantled voluntarily after receiving orders of demolition, among other discrepancies.

"All the report tries to show is the issue of working against unregulated buildings with very basic numbers, without including all the complexities of this issue," said Captain Tzidki Maman, a spokesman for the civil administration.

"It's dealing with numbers from the wrong point of view."

Condoleezza Rice gave a warning yesterday that progress would be slow as the US Secretary of State embarked on a round of shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East in advance of a peace conference next month.

Progress on a joint statement on Palestinian statehood, the framework of the US-hosted conference in Annapolis, Maryland, is still so limited that invitations have yet to be issued, and Dr Rice conceded yesterday that the coming days were unlikely to produce any significant breakthroughs.

Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, said that a joint statement was not a prerequisite for the conference, and is said to prefer a vague statement that will allow him to keep his fragile political coalition at home intact.

Palestinian negotiators have threatened to boycott the conference if a clear and defined statement, including timelines, is not set beforehand.

“Olmert is looking for a public relations conference and one that will allow normalisation with Arab countries,” Riad Malki, the Palestinian Foreign Minister, said. “We will not help him in this.”

Representatives from both sides have met regularly over the past few months. Talk of land swaps and Israel’s willingness to turn over much of Arab east Jerusalem to a future state of Palestine have contributed to a rare, if limited, optimism.

But progress has been slow, and news of the Israeli confiscation of Arab land between east Jerusalem and the settlement of Maale Adumim, has cast a shadow, prompting sharp demands for clarification from Dr Rice.

The “road map” for peace in the Middle East, as called for by the Quartet of mediators – the United Nations, European Union, United States and Russia – calls for a freeze on settlement activity.

She issued a measured warning to the Israelis as she arrived in Jerusalem: “We have to be very careful as we are trying to move toward the establishment of a Palestinian state about actions and statements that erode confidence in the parties’ commitment to a two-state solution.”

Officials say the land is needed for a bypass road, while Palestinians fear it will be used to expand settlements.

Dr Rice met Ehud Barak, the Israeli Defence Minister, yesterday and is expected to meet with leaders on both sides, before travelling to Cairo and London later this week.