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.”

The settlements on the occupied West Bank are illegal under international law, a stumbling block to successive peace proposals.

On the day I see Beni Raz I traverse the spine of Israel's settlements in the West Bank from west of the Palestinian town of Qalqilya to Jerusalem.

There are the Jerusalem settlements that probe into the Arab neighbourhoods in the city's Arab east, pushing between the towns and villages. Prising them apart.

In the countryside, I speed along fast Israeli bypass roads punctuated with their watchtowers grey and tall as giant exclamation marks. Ariel goes by in a blur, big as a city, sprawling across a long ridgeline. Then the hardline settlements around Nablus, some of which I've visited: Eli, Elon More, Yitzhar, Shiloh, breastworks of red-roofed villas spread over successive hills like the fortified communities they are. Commanding the countryside.

Israel's complicity in these communities' continued expansion – despite the demands of the US-backed road map for a freeze on settlement building – was revealed with the recent leaking of a secret Israeli defence ministry database that showed the involvement of government agencies and private companies, in defiance even of the state's own laws. Included in it are a number of structures at Qarne Shomron, where Raz lives.

And in the present election campaign the issue of the settlements has inevitably been unavoidable. It is not only the settlers' own party that has been campaigning on the issue. Binyamin Netanyahu, the leader of the rightwing Likud, who the polls suggest will win the largest number of Knesset seats, also has been rallying his supporters in the settlements with a visit to Beit Ariyeh.

There he warned that Kadima, the centre-right party led by Tzipi Livni, "would have us vacate this place in the belief that it would purchase peace. It won't."

Instead, Netanyahu told the crowd: "It will simply implant a new Hamas terror base here, stacked by Iran with Iranian missiles that would fire on Tel Aviv."

And while Livni has said she would push ahead with the path to peace negotiations outlined in late 2007 at Annapolis, she is squeezed between a hawkish Netanyahu, and the ultra-nationalist Avigdor Lieberman, who would annex Israel's West Bank settlements and place towns that house some of Israel's 20% Arab minority on the other side of a new border.

Out of Gaza and across the border to the sound of rocket fire.

A handful of hours later I am at the Hebrew University for a lecture by Gershon Baskin, one of Israel's most prominent peace activists, who is describing his attempts to open a channel of communication between Israel's leaders and Hamas.

It's a strange and sudden quantum shift – from the ruins, anxiety and stench of war to normality, calm and mannered debate. What it entails is a journey from one ethos of conflict, the Palestinian one still raw, edgy and angry from the recent violence, to an Israeli one, expressed – most obviously for most – in the harsh rhetoric of political contest.

In a bare room littered with bean bags and exposed piping, less than a dozen students sit patiently to listen to Baskin's account. The meeting has been organised by a group called It Is No Legend. It is an ironic play on a quote from Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism: "If you will it, it is no legend".

Herzl meant the will to bring about the foundation of Israel. Among this group it signifies the will to peace and coexistence with Palestinian Arabs.

I know Baskin via his articles and his emails. The story he tells to the students is largely unreported: one of the hidden tales that Israel's government would like to gloss over.

In meetings with Hamas figures, arranged through texts, calls and emails, Baskin established a kind of one-way channel of communication to the office of Israel's prime minister, Ehud Olmert. It was the offer of a means of negotiation that Olmert and his government emphatically rejected.

The students pose questions at the end. Was the war inevitable, they want to know. Most think it was. What are the prospects for the future? It is a subdued gathering.

The reality is that the facts of the war, the civilian deaths and the destruction, are not simply better known in Gaza than they are in Israel. In its sparse attendance, this meeting reflects a fundamental shift in Israeli society – despite the students' excuses to the contrary.

Support for the war has been almost unanimous at up to 94%. Israel's peace movement, as a consequence, has been pushed to the margins like never before. More than that, many of its members have been co-opted.

I recall a conversation I had with Orith Shochat before going into Gaza. A liberal Israeli journalist, she has spent most of her life campaigning against the occupation. It was Shochat who drafted the 2003 letter for the Israeli air force pilots who refused to take part in attacks on civilian areas. This is a war, however, that Shochat has supported.

When I ask her about the civilian casualties she tells me she is "shocked how it does not shock her". "I am amazed," she adds, "how it doesn't haunt me."

She reflects on a journey over five years that led her to the conclusion that the targeted assassinations she once opposed might be more moral than the alternative. That there might be no other solution to the rocket fire out of Gaza than a demonstration that Israel's commitment to deterrence has not weakened.

I meet others – at a friend's flat in Jerusalem and elsewhere – who evince the same views while insisting that they belong to the left; that they support the idea of peace and a negotiated two-state solution.

I hear from several people the conviction that out of the blood of Gaza a new solution and impetus towards peace might yet be born. It is a view, having come from Gaza, that I struggle to understand.

Physics student Ofek Birnholtz, 25, who organised the lecture at the Hebrew University, offers another take. He is convinced that the two trends – strong support for the war and growing support for the end of occupation and a two-state solution – coexist; that it is caught up in a moment of collective anger that will pass.

But the political dynamics of the Israeli election campaign suggest something else is going on. The rightwing Likud party of Binyamin Netanyahu, and the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party of Avigdor Lieberman – both of which had the least to do with the war against Gaza and Hamas – have have benefited most, suggesting a nationalist retrenchment.

The reality is that a polarisation and radicalisation within Palestinian society has been reflected in an equal radicalisation among Israeli Jews, accelerated by the conflict in Gaza, that has seen even well-established connections between peacemakers on both sides collapse.

The question that remains is why?

For Daniel Bar-Tal, of Tel Aviv University, who has a long record of researching the functioning of each group's "conflict ethos" in the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation, the current state of the national psyche is as much manufactured as it is willed.

He explained it in a recent interview in Haaretz. "After the bitter experience of the second Lebanon war, during which the memory of the war was taken out of their hands and allowed to be formed freely," he explained, "the country's leaders learned their lesson, and decided that they wouldn't let that happen again.

"They were not satisfied with attempts to inculcate Palestinian awareness and tried to influence Jewish awareness in Israel as well. For that purpose, heavy censorship and monitoring of information were imposed [during the Gaza campaign]."

It was achieved, he believes, by the willing enlistment of the media, who concentrated only on the sense of victimisation of residents of the so-called "Gaza envelope" – those within the range of missiles from Gaza – largely ignoring the situation of the residents of besieged Gaza.

The veteran peace campaigner Gila Svirsky, of Women in Black, argues for an even more radical interpretation. At her small flat in Jerusalem, cluttered with the mementoes of her life in activism, she says she believes that much of the rejection of the "others' story" has been self-willed.

Gila tells me a story. It is about a neighbour who admits avoiding the take of foreign media on Gaza to avoid being challenged in her assumptions.

"You can feel it," says Gila. "The temptation of being sucked into only watching Israeli news. It is really hard to extricate oneself from the dominant discourse. There is a word in Hebrew – miguyas – it means, I suppose, seduced. People don't want to go there. Don't want to think bad thoughts [about what is being done in their name]."

It has been accomplished, Svirsky insists, by portraying Hamas as an "existential threat, the forward guard of Iran", not as a local problem to be negotiated. It is precisely the story that Netanyahu has been pushing so hard and successfully in the election campaign.

But there is another difficulty. While those like Gershon Baskin frame the war in terms of multiple missed opportunities to engage with Hamas – or attempts to understand it at least – there are others on the left like Yaron Ezrahi, author and professor of politics at the Hebrew University, who believe there was a failure on the Israeli left's part to formulate an adequate response to the Qassam missiles fired out of Gaza into southern Israel.

Despite that, this war – he insists to me – will be Israel's "Macbeth moment". It will be something – to reverse Shochat's formulation – to shock in the long run. "Israel will be forever haunted by the ghosts of this war," Ezrahi says sadly.

But in the immediate aftermath of war, there does not seem to be much haunting of the majority. It is embraced enthusiastically, grimly or fatalistically as necessary.

At the margins it is not rejected but avoided. I meet an elderly woman in a deli in west Jerusalem, listening to the radio and drinking her tea among a handful of pavement tables. I am told she was a demolitions expert in the Palmach, the organisation that fought for Israel's creation in 1948.

We chat and she is happy to talk about most things. But when I ask her about the current situation she says – with a touch of anger at my presumption in asking the question – that she does not feel well enough informed to comment.

A young woman at Hebrew University, who listens to Baskin for an hour and half, fends off my questions with the same determined excuse: she does not know enough.

But in the offices of Breaking the Silence, the organisation of former Israeli soldiers dedicated to exposing human rights abuses committed by the Israeli defence forces, Michael Manekin and Yehuda Shaul believe it is simply a question of time.

After previous operations, they say, it has taken six months to a year for soldiers to come forward with testimony about events that disturbed them.

The media, Manekin explains, acted as the military's cheerleader at the beginning of the war in Gaza. Now, he says, it is calling every day, hungry for soldiers' stories that contradict the official line.

Yehuda, a burly former infantryman who served during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, opens up a scanned file on his computer – a pamphlet circulated by the army's chief military rabbi to soldiers before entering Gaza. It is a document as unsettling in its own way as the religious justifications of Hamas for its own violence. It talks about the necessity of cruelty against the enemy, and dehumanises and de-legitimises the Palestinians and their claims.

Manekin translates the words: "We are not allowed by religious command to return an inch of land to the Palestinians. It is our land – God's land. There is a question [in the pamphlet]: 'Can we compare the Palestinians now to the biblical era of the Philistines? And if so, does this guide us how we act militarily'? The answer says: 'Yes we can. The Palestinians like the Philistines are not a natural part of this region'."

Listening to Manekin, I think about the words of Bar-Tal. And I wonder – as I have always wondered in wartime – how much is manufactured? How much willed?

And I wonder what kind of government a society still drunk on the euphoria of military action will elect with a handful of days remaining.

Israel has admitted – after mounting pressure – that its troops may have used white phosphorus shells in contravention of international law, during its three-week offensive in the Gaza Strip.

One of the places most seriously affected by the use of white phosphorus was the main UN compound in Gaza City, which was hit by three shells on 15 January. The same munition was used in a strike on the al-Quds hospital in Gaza City the same day.

Under review by Colonel Shai Alkalai is the use of white phosphorus by a reserve paratroop brigade in northern Israel.

According to army sources the brigade fired up to 20 phosphorus shells in a heavily built-up area around the Gaza township of Beit Lahiya, one of the worst hit areas of Gaza.

The internal inquiry – which the army says does not have the status of the full investigation demanded by human rights groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch – follows weeks of fighting in which Israel either denied outright that it was using phosphorus-based weapons, or insisted that what weapons it was using "were in line with international law".

An Israeli child from a far-right settler group in the West Bank city of Hebron hurls a stone up the stairs of a Palestinian family close to their settlement and shouts: "I will exterminate you." Another spits towards the same family.

Another settler woman pushes her face up to a window and snarls: "Whore!"

They are shocking images. There is footage of beatings, their aftermath, and the indifference of Israel's security forces to serious human rights abuses. There is footage too of those same security forces humiliating Palestinians – and most seriously – committing abuses themselves.

They are contained in a growing archive of material assembled by the Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem in a remarkable project called Shooting Back.

The group has supplied almost 100 video cameras to vulnerable Palestinian communities in Hebron, the northern West Bank and elsewhere, to document and gather evidence of assaults and abusive behaviour – largely by settlers.

"We gave the first video camera out in Hebron [in January 2007]," says Diala Shamas a Jerusalem-based researcher with B'Tselem. But the project took off in earnest, however, in January this year.

The video is sometimes chaotic, jumpy. Sometimes only the audio is captured and a pair of soldiers' boots.

But what it documents in all its rough reality is the experience of occupation on a daily basis for the most vulnerable families and communities – giving a voice to those who have been voiceless for so long.

"Right now we have about 100 video cameras," adds Shamas. "The largest number are in the Hebron region where the most frequent complaints of settler attacks are. And recently in the northern area and the region next to the [building] of the [separation] wall where there are demonstrations."

She explains the reason for introducing the Shooting Back project.

"The project started as response to the need to gather evidence. We were constantly filing complaints to no avail on the basis of lack of evidence, or … we don't know the name of the settler.

"Now we are going back and forth with our video-cassettes to [Israeli] police station begging them to press rewind, freeze… it is the bulk of our work. The value of the footage is not only evidential. It also has had a remarkable value in terms of advocacy and campaigning.

'We quickly realised the media value of this footage. It is maybe an overstatement but we started bridging this gap between what was happening in the occupied Palestinian territories and what the Israeli public can see.

"There was a conspiracy of silence surrounding settler violence in particular. This footage is shocking to Israelis.'

And in particular it has been two pieces of video, shot by Palestinians this year and released by B'Tselem, that have gained massive international attention by throwing the issue of human rights abuses in the occupied Palestinian territories back into the spotlight.

The first was footage of a group of four hooded settlers from the settlement of Susya armed with what look like pickaxe handles brutally beating a group of Palestinian farmers.

The second – not taken as part of Shooting Back programme – but supplied to B'Tselem by a 17-year-old schoolgirl from the village of Ni'ilin earlier this month showed a protester against the building of the West Bank barrier on his village's land being shot in the foot by an Israeli soldier with a plastic bullet as he was held blindfold and bound.

The protester was Ashraf Abu Rahma, aged 27. The video was shot by Salam Kanaan aged 17. A constant presence at the demonstrations in the Palestinian villages in the rocky hills of the West Bank, Ashraf is employed by the villages as a watchman on land that is threatened with being taken from the Palestinian villages for the building of the West Bank barrier.

He says he was unaware of what was happening to him until almost the moment before he was shot and wounded in the foot.

It is only when he saw the video too that he was able to understand what happened to him.

Arrested during a demonstration against the West Bank barrier in Ni'ilin on July 7 he recalled last week being almost immediately blindfolded.

"They had rounded up the foreigners [from the International Solidarity Movement] and arrested me and another guy separately.

"They put me in a jeep and started cursing me, hitting me and using bad language in Hebrew and Arabic. It had never occurred to me that they would shoot.

"They held me in the sun for a long time. Later I heard them discussing what they were going to do with me.

"I recall hearing a conversation about how to shoot me. What I recall is the words rubber bullet, rubber bullet... I was blindfolded so I was only aware of their aggression.

"It was only when I saw Salam's video that I understood what happened to me. The guy touching me on my right shoulder before I was shot.

"Just before it happened they said they're going to beat me. They said they were going to send me to hell. They know me because I've been to every protest."

Ashraf claims the abuse continued even when he was on the ground after the shot was fired. "When I asked for medical attention they said: this is nothing, we are going to beat you more."

Although the Israeli military's version is that the shooting was a misunderstanding of the orders given by the lieutenant colonel on the scene — and that the aim was only to "frighten" Ashraf examination of the footage makes it hard to credit that version.

Eyad Haddad, B'Tselem's Ramallah-based field researcher who tracked down the footage of Ashraf's punishment shooting, believes that the project has helped supply crucial evidence in documenting abuses.

"These events that happen are often so distant, or happen in the middle of the night, where there is no media.

"Where we've seen there is a lot of violation from the settlers and especially where there are demonstrations happening and we want to monitor the Israeli soldier's behaviour we are distributing video cameras.

"It is having a good effect and it will stop the violations."

Haddad says the organisation is now trying to encourage people living in areas of confrontation to use their own cameras — if they have them – or mobile phones to film potential abuses that they encounter.

"We want to encourage a mentality to use the cameras. It is the only weapon that the civilians have."

According to Diala Shamas the recent high international profile of the footage shot of the settler beating in Susya and the shooting of Ashraf Abu Rahma has meant that the group has not only been inundated with requests for cameras from Palestinian communities, but those who already have cameras supplied by B'Tselem are shooting more footage of their day to day experiences.

"In the beginning we were almost begging people to take the cameras with them when they went out. They didn't see the use of it. But after the media coverage over the Susya incident… we've gotten a flood of requests for our video cameras. And those who have got the cameras are using them much more frequently."

Commenting on the Ni'ilin footage she said: "It is one of the biggest victories because it is the troops not the settlers. It is not just a 'rotten apple' which is usually the response that we get from the government spokespeople. We didn't give out 100 video cameras to document rotten apples. It was to show there was something systematic happening and it was structural to the occupation.

"In this case it was remarkable that it was actually the soldiers themselves. They did in fact open an investigation.

"They couldn't ignore it."