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.”

ATARA, West Bank -- Work crews have broken ground on what they hope will be the first modern, planned Palestinian city - a step officials say will help build an independent state in spite of the current deadlock in the peace process with Israel.

But without Israeli approval of a short stretch of road, the $500-million project may never get off the ground.

"We could build the whole city, but the question is, would people live in a city that doesn't have an access road?" said Bashar Masri, managing director of the company behind the project.

"Obviously, the answer is no."

Since last week, machine operators have been hard at work, taking chunks out of a rocky hillside near this West Bank village. If the project goes according to plan, it will provide 40,000 Palestinians with homes in an American-style development.

Palestinians say Israel has not responded to their requests about the access road. The Israeli Defense Ministry, which is in charge of the area, did not return calls from The Associated Press about the issue.

Israel's stated policy is to promote economic development in the West Bank, and construction of the new town would appear to fall within that goal. But two miles (three kilometers) of the road would have to be built through a part of the West Bank that Israel controls, within view of a Jewish settlement, raising possible complications.

Western-backed Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, an internationally respected economist, has announced plans to build institutions regardless of progress in peace talks, aiming to be ready for statehood in two years. The new city, known as Rawabi, would be a key part of that plan.

Rawabi, about 20 miles (30 kilometers) north of Jerusalem, is designed to look much like an American suburb.

Standing over a working model in the office of Bayti Real Estate Investment Company in Ramallah, Masri pointed to the city's egg-shaped, hilltop center, saying it will hold office and residential towers, a conference center and hotel, shops, cafes and a movie theater. The center will be a pedestrian zone with an underground car park, he said.

Cities like Ramallah and Nablus have sprawled into the West Bank countryside over the last century, leaving them with insufficient roads, infrastructure and parking space, producing daily traffic jams that snarl their centers.

In Rawabi, by contrast, a series of roads will loop down the hillside, lined with residential buildings connected by footpaths, designed for the Palestinian middle class, Masri said. Residents will have ample parking and access to parks, schools, mosques and a church.

Masri declined to give condo prices, but said 5,000 units are designed for Palestinians who can afford monthly mortgage payments of between $400 and $700. Another 1,000 deluxe units will sell for more, he said.

The project is being funded by Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment Co. and Ramallah-based Massar International.

To help families purchase homes, the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corp., an investment arm of the U.S. government, is helping establish a mortgage assistance project.

Masri's company plans to start pouring foundations in three months, he said, and says the first residents should move in by 2013.

That is, assuming the city gets its access road.

Reaching the site now means following a narrow, winding road through a number of Palestinian villages. Planners have laid out a new access road, but about two miles (three kilometers) of it cross an Israeli-controlled zone, said Amir Dajani, Bayti's deputy director.

Dajani said the Palestinian Authority has asked Israel to put the stretch of road under Palestinian jurisdiction, but has yet to get a response.

"The access road is an artery for the project," Dajani said. "It is critical for its success and future growth and a prerequisite for its sustainability."

Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev declined to comment on the project, but said Israel considers economic growth in the West Bank "the best antidote to extremism and terrorism."

For now, the project is moving ahead. Last Wednesday, a team of tractors carved a local road into the rocky hillside, while orange-vested surveyors and engineers in hardhats prepared other sites.

Standing on the hilltop slated to host the future downtown, site manager Maher Sawalha pointed to where he hopes to build the city's roads, condos and sewage treatment plant.

Palestinian villages stood clustered on adjacent hilltops, and the Israeli metropolis of Tel Aviv on the Mediterranean coast was clearly visible, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) to the west.

"If it's clear and you have a sunny day, you can see all the way to the sea," Sawalha said.

Sawalha, a 45-year-old father of six, said he planned to move from his rented apartment in Ramallah to Rawabi as soon as possible.

"It's a dream to own a house here, in a new city where you work and live quietly with your kids," he said. "It will be similar to life in the U.S."

The number of Gazans living in "abject" poverty has tripled this year to 300,000, or one in five residents, the Gaza head of the U.N. agency helping Palestinian refugees said Thursday.

Gaza's economy has foundered under an Israeli-Egyptian border blockade imposed after the Islamic militant group Hamas seized control of the territory in 2007 from forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

John Ging, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency's top official in Gaza, called the rise in poverty a "predictable consequence" of the border blockade.

"The suffering, the impoverishment, the misery of the people here in Gaza continues to rise because of a man-made crisis, a political failure," Ging told reporters.

The blockade's toll on Gaza residents was compounded by Israel's winter offensive in the strip that aimed to stop Palestinian rocket fire at southern Israel. Thousands of homes, government buildings and businesses were destroyed during the Israeli campaign.

U.N. staff said the rise also reflects improved monitoring of refugees' economic conditions.

The U.N. agency provides services, including emergency food rations, to 750,000 of Gaza's 1.4 million residents. Those who are unable to feed their families are considered "abject poor" and receive extra aid, the agency said.

Ging said lifting the blockade is the only way to stop Gaza's rising poverty, and appealed for more funding to help his agency meet the growing need.

Israeli officials have said they fear that easing the blockade will benefit Hamas, and say they won't reopen the border crossings until the militant group releases an Israeli soldier captured more than three years ago.

A first sign of progress toward a prisoner exchange emerged Wednesday when Israel agreed to release 20 Palestinian women from its prisons in exchange for a recent video of the soldier.

A veteran U.N. war crimes investigator acknowledged his probe of possible war crimes by Israel and Hamas — which included interviewing dozens of victims and poring through the files of human rights groups — is unlikely to lead to prosecutions.

Israel has refused to cooperate, depriving his team access to military sources and victims of Hamas rockets. And Hamas security often accompanied his team during their five-day trip to Gaza last week, raising questions about the ability of witnesses to freely describe the militant group's actions.

But the chief barrier remains the lack of a court with clear jurisdiction to hear any resulting cases stemming from the investigation into Israel's three-week offensive in Gaza which ended in January and was designed to stop years of Hamas rocket fire into southern Israel.

"From a practical political point of view, I wish I could be optimistic," Judge Richard Goldstone said, citing the legal and political barriers to war crimes trials.

Still, Goldstone hopes his group's report — due in September — will spur action by other U.N. bodies and foreign governments.

Goldstone, a South African judge who prosecuted war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, refused to comment on the investigation's content. But AP interviews with more than a dozen Gazans who spoke to the team reveal a wide-ranging investigation into the war's most prominent allegations.

In Gaza, Goldstone's 15-member team met with Hamas and U.N. officials, collected reports from Palestinian human rights groups and interviewed dozens of survivors.

Among them was a Bedouin man who told the investigators how he watched Israeli soldiers shoot his mother and sister dead as they fled their home waving white flags. But he, too, doubted he would see justice.

"The committee was just like all the others who have come," said 46-year-old Majed Hajjaj. "There are lots of reports written, but they're nothing more than ink on paper."

The U.N. team also stepped through the shrapnel-peppered doorway of a mosque where an Israeli missile strike killed 16 people, witnesses said. During the war, Israel accused Hamas of hiding weapons in mosques. Witnesses said no weapons or militants were present.

They inspected holes in the street near a U.N. school where Israeli artillery killed 42 people, and visited the charred skeleton of a hospital torched by Israeli shells. In both cases, the army said militants had fired from nearby, and witnesses said some had been near the school.

And they visited the Samouni family, whose members say they took refuge on soldiers' orders in a house that was then shelled, killing 21 people.

Israel denies the account, but says the house may have been hit in crossfire with militants.

Israel launched the offensive to stop eight years of Hamas rocket attacks. Palestinian human rights groups say more than 1,400 Gazans were killed, most of them civilians. Israel says around 1,100 Gazans were killed and that most were militants, but — unlike the Palestinian researchers — did not publish the names of the dead. Thirteen Israelis were also killed, three of them civilians.

Human rights groups called for war crimes investigations soon after the war's end, accusing Israel of disproportionate force and failing to protect civilians. Some groups and the Israeli army said Hamas fought from civilian areas and used human shields — all of which can be war crimes.

Israel's refusal to cooperate meant that Goldstone — a Jew with close ties to the Jewish state — had to enter Gaza via Egypt.

Speaking to a parliamentary committee on Tuesday, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Israel had made a "clear decision" not to cooperate, alleging anti-Israeli bias by the probe's sponsor, the U.N. Human Rights Council.

The council has a record of criticizing Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.

Lieberman also mentioned that Goldstone team member Christine Chinkin, a law professor at the London School of Economics, signed an editorial published in the Sunday Times in January calling the Israeli offensive a war crime. This showed she could not be objective in her findings, Lieberman said. More than 20 scholars and jurists signed the letter.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said investigators could not reach an "unbiased conclusion" since they couldn't question those who fired rockets at Israel.

When asked if the team met with Hamas fighters, team member Hina Jilani declined to comment, but said Hamas had been "very cooperative."

A Hamas official, Ahmed Yousef, said he hoped the group's report would be "like ammunition in the hands of the people who are willing to sue Israeli war criminals."

Some survivors said the team pressed them on Israel's assertion that it made warning phone calls before airstrikes and whether militants fought or fired rockets from their neighborhoods.

"They asked for all the details. Were there rockets fired from the area, why did they target this area specifically, stuff like that," said Ziad Deeb, 22, who told the team how he lost 11 relatives and both his legs when an artillery shell exploded on his doorstep.

Alex Whiting, a professor at Harvard law school, called Goldstone "supremely qualified" for such an investigation, but said such cases are hard to investigate, especially without military records. He also said there are few mechanisms for prosecution if crimes are uncovered.

But even without prosecution, Whiting said, inquiries can spur countries to investigate themselves or affect future wartime conduct.

"Many times, the immediate result is a disappointment for the victims and survivors, but the hope is for the future," he said.

Mohammed Habboush and his wife Ikram wanted so badly to make the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca from their Gaza home that they sold her gold jewelry to pay for the trip.

But while Muslims from around the world head to Saudi Arabia for the annual "hajj" pilgrimage, which starts Sunday, the couple remains at home, two of thousands of Gazan pilgrims prevented from traveling by the latest round of Palestinian squabbling.

The power to decide which Gazans can undertake the sacred hajj has become the latest battleground between rival Palestinian factions. Both the Hamas government in Gaza and President Mahmoud Abbas' Palestinian Authority in the West Bank have used this year's pilgrimage to flex their muscles, drawing harsh condemnation from Muslim leaders for politicizing one of Islam's most sacred acts.

Performing the hajj pilgrimage is one of the five pillars of Islam and is considered the high point of a Muslim believer's life. Saudi Arabia sets the number of pilgrims different regions can send to Mecca each year. Gaza receives about 3,000 spots.

This year's troubles began when the Hamas government in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank both submitted lists of Gazans eligible for the hajj. When Saudi authorities granted visas only to pilgrims on the West Bank government's list, Hamas prevented them from leaving Gaza.

Both governments claim legitimacy in Gaza, but Hamas has ruled the territory since expelling forces loyal to Abbas in 2007.

Conservative Arab regimes are troubled by the Hamas takeover but usually refrain from open criticism in the name of solidarity with the Palestinian people. Egypt has hosted several rounds of unsuccessful talks to resolve the dispute between Fatah and Hamas.

But the Hamas refusal to let Gaza's pilgrims travel drew criticism from Muslim leaders.

In Cairo, Grand Sheik Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi of al-Azhar, Sunni Islam's pre-eminent institution and oldest university, said it was sin to prevent pilgrims from reaching their destination.

"Islamic law categorically prohibits anyone from preventing others from heading to perform the pilgrimage for any reason or under any pretext," Sheik Omar Bastawisi, a former Al-Azhar senior official, told AP Thursday.

Mahmoud Habbash, Palestinian social affairs minister in the West Bank, called the Hamas actions "a double crime."

"It's an attack against religion because it's forbidding people from conducting one of their five basic religious duties, and it's discrimination that divides the Palestinian people," Habbash said at a Thursday news conference.

Talib Abu Shaar, religious affairs minister in Gaza, said Gaza's pilgrims had always been selected by local authorities and accused the Abbas regime of politicizing the hajj by breaking this tradition.

The political arguments meant little to would-be pilgrims.

"No one has ever prevented the pilgrims from getting out," said Abu Yusuf, who received a spot on the Hamas list. "I'm very surprised, especially since it was done by Palestinians, people from our country and our same religion."

Habboush, who sold his wife's gold the day he found their names on the Ramallah list, are bitterly disappointed.

"We'll sit at home and watch Mecca on TV and cry because we want to be there," he said. "People from all over the world get to go, but we can't."