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.”

FOR three weeks, seven-month-old Mohammed Abu Amra has been lying in Gaza's main paediatric hospital, suffering from immune deficiency and suspected cystic fibrosis.

His doctors do not have the drug they need to relieve his symptoms, which include fever and distressed breathing, racking his thin ribs at almost twice the healthy rate of breaths per minute.

Nor does any hospital in the sealed-off Gaza Strip have the equipment or expertise needed to clinically diagnose Mohammed's condition. For eight days his doctors have been waiting for a reply to their request to transfer the baby to a hospital in Israel. If it is not granted, they say, he will probably die.

"Because of the Israeli siege the number of patients who can travel is very limited," says paediatrician Dr Ahmed Shakat, standing over the child's bed in Gaza's al-Nasser hospital.

"In the past it took one day to transfer an urgent patient to Israel. Now I need maybe five, maybe 10, if it happens at all. The Israelis say it's because of security, but it means urgent cases can die. In the past we could have transferred him also to Egypt, but now that border is closed because of the siege."

Baby Amra is not expected to die quickly if denied proper treatment. Nor would any single factor or player be directly responsible for his death. If he dies it will be partly because he was sick, partly because he was weak, partly because he could not escape from Gaza, partly because the things he needed to survive were not provided to him quickly enough or in sufficient quantity; a variety of reasons that the Israeli government, the rival Palestinian factions and international humanitarian bodies all seek to blame on each other.

In this the child resembles the Gaza Strip itself, a real-life dystopia cut off from the outside world where, under the pressure of half a dozen or so slowly tightening screws, life is coming apart at every seam. Mahmoud Daher, Gaza director of the UN-affiliated World Health Organisation (WHO), says that the health service is where the effects of Palestinian infighting and Israel's blockade are showing most dramatically.

Last week WHO reported that out of the 782 Gaza patients to have sought specialist treatment outside the Strip since the siege was tightened in June, 100 have been granted permits by Israel to leave.

Of those, 27 were turned back to Gaza after being interrogated by Israeli security agents at the Erez crossing. Four died after their passage was delayed or refused; another seven died while waiting for permits in Gaza hospitals.

In October, an Israeli newspaper and two human rights groups charged that agents of the Israeli security organisation Shin Bet who are based at Erez were attempting to recruit patients or their parents as informers by threatening to prevent them gaining treatment.

Several who declined said they were turned back or subsequently refused passage for follow-up treatment on the grounds they were "security risks".

The Israeli government denied the allegation, claiming it was the Hamas government in Gaza which was somehow closing the crossings after it took control of the Strip from its Fatah rival in June. A spokesman also suggested that the rights groups did not have access to Shin Bet's secret information on the patients.

According to the WHO report, one-fifth of essential drugs and 31% of medical supplies were no longer available in Gaza by October and 11 out of 18 psychiatric drugs had run out in August, a time when health workers were observing a "growing proportion of the population experiencing psychological symptoms".

The neonatal death rate in Gaza's paediatric hospitals has increased from 5.6% in January-October 2006 to 6.9% in the same period this year.

But while local doctors and politicians blame the crisis on Israel's blockade, alleging that vital drug shipments are being stopped border crossings, the WHO says the situation is more complex.

Local director Daher reports that WHO, which together with the World Bank pays for more than 90% of the Palestinian Authority's essential drugs, has little difficulty getting its shipments through Israeli security checks into Gaza. But bureaucratic failings in the administration of the drugs system, which first broke down in November 2005, were exacerbated by last year's election victory of the Islamist Hamas movement, which refuses to recognise Israel's right to exist or renounce armed resistance.

Israel's subsequent Western-backed economic and diplomatic boycott bankrupted the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority (PA), further paralysing its medical administration. In Gaza, the situation worsened in June this year, when Hamas fighters routed security forces and militias loyal to the US and Israeli-backed former ruling party, Fatah.

In response, Israel further tightened its severe restrictions on Gaza's economy, banning all exports and cutting off imports of all but basic foodstuffs and what it terms "humanitarian supplies".

Yet such is the scale of the Palestinian Authority's internal collapse that even in the Fatah-held West Bank, where Israel has eased its boycott in an effort to further isolate Hamas and preserve Mahmoud Abbas's notional authority, the health system is also in crisis.

"There are shortages in the West Bank as well, but the difference is that in the West Bank you have relative freedom to move about to seek drugs and treatment, but the Gaza Strip is hermetically sealed off from the outside world," says Daher.

He believes that Gaza's health service, like Gaza itself, faces slow strangulation rather than dramatic collapse. "For example, one reason the quality of medical care is deteriorating here is because they can't get permission from Israel to send people out for training."

Similarly, there is little chance of people starving to death as long as Israel continues to allow international donors to bring in basic foodstuffs. Gazans will survive, but as idle prisoners on a diet of little more than bread and water.

"Around 80% of the population is now aid-dependent, and many of the rest work for international organisations or the UN," says Daher.

"Unemployment is increasing, so while you don't have major deterioration in physical health, you do have problems with mental health. There are problems of frustration, depression, insomnia, increased bed-wetting in children and domestic violence, and these are being reported more and more by researchers. It's very alarming. The whole social fabric is being destroyed."

As society in general weakens, it becomes ever more vulnerable to the next complication. Last week it was a fuel crisis sparked by Israel's decision to reduce oil supplies to the Strip by 15% to retaliate against militants who continue to fire missiles at Israeli communities bordering the Strip.

But instead of being cut by 15%, the UN and local garage-owners say supplies of diesel and petrol have been halved, leaving hospitals short of fuel for generators, vital during the frequent power cuts.

"The Israelis are using fuel as a political weapon," says Khaled Radi, a spokesman for the health ministry in Gaza, now a breakaway administration under the Strip's rump Hamas government. "Because of this we've had to stop some external clinics, and we've also stopped operating most ministry vehicles and ambulances. The ambulances can be used only in the most urgent cases."

According to the WHO, some hospitals, including the paediatric hospital where baby Amra is fighting for his life, had by the middle of last week no stores of diesel left for their emergency generators.

The Petroleum and Gas Stations Owners Association of Gaza responded to the fuel cuts by, in effect, going on strike. "We decided to stop accepting their reduced supply as a form of protest against a policy that has killed off commercial life here in Gaza," said vice-chairman, Dr Mahmoud Khozander.

"Two days ago the Israelis said they would improve the supply to half of our basic minimum requirement, but we refused. It's better to die quickly than to drag things out for months."

But an Israeli military spokesman said last week that the sharp decline in fuel supplies to Gaza was the result of the Palestinians' own failure to pay the private Israeli company granted a monopoly to supply fuel to Palestinians.

This, he said on Thursday, had already been resolved, and Israel was pumping fresh supplies into the PA-owned storage tanks just inside the Gaza border.

Yet the restored supply was still unaccountable, about half of Gaza's demand, a much bigger reduction than that officially sanctioned by the government and endorsed by Israel's supreme court.

The Gaza fuel retailers reject claims they failed to pay for their supplies. They say that, in accordance with the status quo before this June's civil conflict, they still pay for their supplies in full and in cash to the rump Fatah government of Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

A state fuel company official in Gaza - now in Hamas's hands - accused Fatah of deliberately failing to pay for Gaza's fuel supply, turning the public into pawns in its war with Hamas. Similar suggestions have been made about the Fatah government's alleged failure to "co-ordinate" shipments of medical supplies to state hospitals in Hamas-run Gaza.

So general is the economic and social malaise in Gaza that even industries that might have been thought to be blockade-proof are feeling the pinch. For thousands of donkey and pony-cart operators the fuel crisis has yet to provide a boom in custom.

"Maybe in the near future when the fuel runs out, business will pick up a little, but for now we're in as much trouble as anybody else," says Hamsa Jalhoun, 22, sitting in a long line of pony-carts waiting for hire at Jabaliya vegetable market.

"A 50kg bag of oats is twice what it was before the Israelis started their siege in June, and business is down because nobody has any money. When we can't feed our animals any more we'll have to turn them loose in the street to find their own food." With 1.5 million people squeezed into 140 sq-miles of concrete buildings and desert, Gaza produces little animal feed of its own.

Mussab Nyasa, 20, a feed merchant in Jabaliya, says the siege has cause the market to collapse. "A lot of people who kept livestock have now slaughtered them and eaten them because they can't afford to feed them any more."

Even Gaza's indefatigable smugglers can find something to complain about. "Last week I smuggled 100 rifles in from Egypt," said "Abu Mussab", one of the operators of smuggling tunnels dug under the border of Gaza and Egypt.

"They cost me $700 each, and when I sold them here I could only get $500 for them. In the past we could smuggle weapons in for both Fatah and Hamas, when they were fighting each other, but now there is no internal fighting and Hamas controls everything. Nobody wants weapons any more," he said.