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.”

Israel's relations with the European Union were tense for most of 2009 - if newspaper headlines are to be believed. In the past week, a British court drew fierce criticism from Israeli politicians after it issued an arrest warrant for Tzipi Livni, the former Israeli foreign minister, following a complaint that she had authorised war crimes in Gaza.

A few months earlier, Ikea, Volvo and other firms from Sweden, the current holder of the EU's presidency, found themselves the target of a consumer boycott campaign in Israel because of an article in a Stockholm tabloid on the alleged theft of organs from Palestinians killed by Israeli troops. And several of the Union's foreign ministers, such as France's Bernard Kouchner and Ireland's Micheلl Martin, have been denied permission to enter Gaza by the Israeli authorities.

In reality, however, the tension has been superficial. While there may have been the occasional angry word exchanged on the diplomatic front, the EU's political and economic ties with Israel have been strengthened over the past few years to such an extent that Javier Solana, who stepped down as the Union's foreign policy chief in late November, has remarked that Israel is an EU member state in all but name.

Perhaps the most tangible illustration of this enhanced relationship was the sealing of an accord on agriculture last month, under which 80 percent of Israel's fresh produce and 95 percent of its processed foods can be exported to the EU without incurring any trade taxes. A cooperation accord between Europol, the EU's police office, and Israel has also been finalised (though still awaits a formal rubber-stamp from the Union's governments). This is despite numerous reports from human rights organisations that detainees in Israel are routinely tortured and despite rules in force since 1998 that oblige Europol not to process evidence obtained by cruel methods.

Israel's effective integration into the EU has coincided with a marked reluctance on the part of the Union to denounce acts of aggression against the Palestinians. Although some individual EU representatives have described the blockade of Gaza as an act of "collective punishment" against 1.5 million civilians, no statement criticising the blockade as contrary to international humanitarian law has been issued by the 27-member bloc in its entirety.

Furthermore, all of the EU's most populous countries - Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Spain and Poland - either opposed the Goldstone report or abstained when it was considered by the UN's General Assembly in November. (In that report, the retired South African judge Richard Goldstone and his fellow investigators found there was no justifiable military objective behind almost every attack on Gaza's civilians undertaken by Israel in late 2008 and the beginning of this year).

Leila Shahid, the Palestinian Authority's envoy to Brussels, says that the EU's largest countries are "accomplices by their silence" in Israel's misdeeds. "The raison d'être of the bigger states - including France and Spain and Great Britain - is to be guarantors of international law," she told IPS. "To be silent is to be part of the crime."

Dries Van Agt, prime minister of the Netherlands from 1977 to 1982, said this week that he was "ashamed" of what he called Europe's "shocking disservice to international law." Under an "association agreement" which came into effect in 2000, all trade preferences granted to Israel by the EU are nominally conditional on respect for human rights. Yet Van Agt expressed frustration that the Union, Israel's main trading partner, is unwilling to revoke those preferences to insist on an improvement in the treatment of the Palestinians.

"Europe is failing miserably in its Israel-Palestine policy," he said. "It is so vitally important to the economy of Israel that it has access to this big open market. Why does the EU not even consider bringing this power to bear on Israel?" Van Agt was speaking at a meeting of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine Thursday. Inspired by a probe into the Vietnam war launched by the British intellectual Bertrand Russell in the 1960s, this tribunal is exploring the conduct of Israel's most recent offensive against Gaza.

Maysa Zorob from the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq said that the EU's "business as usual approach amounts to disregarding Israel's policies in the Gaza Strip." She noted that the Union has not even brought Israel to book for the damage inflicted on Palestinian infrastructure built or maintained with EU aid. Damage to EU-financed projects during Israeli bombing of Gaza about a year ago has been calculated at more than 12 million euros (17 million dollars).

One explanation put forward by EU diplomats for their refusal to hold Israel to account is that doing so could put efforts to initiate new peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in jeopardy. Nathalie Stanus from the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network said that this attitude is shortsighted as basic tenets of justice must be respected if a durable peace can be achieved. "Without accountability, we don't believe there will be a viable peace process," she said.

The European Union is considering new steps to deepen its cooperation on scientific research with Israel, despite admitting that previous funds earmarked for that purpose have gone to firms operating illegally in the Palestinian territories.

Between now and 2013, the Israeli government is to contribute 440 million euros (652 million dollars) per year so that it can participate in the EU's so-called framework programme for research.

An unpublished document prepared by EU diplomats reveals that because much of the joint research will relate to security issues, Israel has requested a formal assurance that any information it gives to Brussels will be treated confidentially.

The document, seen by IPS, says that the Israeli authorities have indicated that there is a need for an agreement with the EU because the "exchange of classified material may be necessary." Dated Feb. 15, the paper suggests that EU governments should open negotiations with Israel in order to conclude a "security of information" accord.

Israel's request for confidentiality follows an admission by the EU that some firms based in the occupied Palestinian territories had received money under an earlier research programme funded by European taxpayers.

In a 2006 memo, the EU's executive, the European Commission, blamed "administrative errors" for how firms based in illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza had benefited from such funding. The Commission promised at that time that it would be "very vigilant" in monitoring the future use of the EU's research budget, which totals 50 billion euros over the next seven years.

Sandrine Grenier from the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network said that any support for companies in the Palestinian territories "violates the EU's own obligations."

The EU's relations with Israel are based on an 'association agreement' that entered into force in 2000. It commits both sides to uphold human rights and democratic principles.

Yet despite the mass killings of Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces in recent years, the EU has not imposed sanctions against Israel. B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights organisation, has calculated that of the 810 Palestinians killed by the occupying forces in Gaza in 2006 and 2007, just 360 belonged to an armed organisation.

Eoin Murray, the Middle East programme officer with the Irish anti-poverty organisation Trَcaire, said that the human rights clause in the association agreement "has to have teeth".

"Until it has teeth, it is meaningless; it doesn't have any impact at all," he added. "The EU might have to stop cooperating with Israel on certain issues because it is not complying with its legal obligations."

Ton Van Lierop, the Commission's spokesman for enterprise and industry, acknowledged that the joint research with Israel will have a so-called anti-terrorist dimension.

But he insisted that it will be focused on "civil security" such as measures to improve ambulance and fire brigade services. "It is not aimed at the military," he said. "We always have an ethical review of our programmes. Human rights are always at the forefront and are always important for the European Commission."

Security has been identified as one of the priorities of the EU's framework programme for research. Projects already approved for funding relate to such matters as boosting efforts to detect explosives at airports and protecting drinking water from possible attacks from biological and chemical weapons.

Israel was the first non-EU country to be accepted for joint activities under the programme. The importance of defence to the Israeli economy has increased considerably in recent years. Exports of defence equipment from Israel grew from 1.6 billion dollars in 1992 to 3.4 billion in 2006, making Israel the fourth largest arms dealer on the planet.

Some analysts have indicated that drawing a distinction between civil and military security in Israel is fraught with risks. Israel, for example, has a high level of expertise in technology that can be used for both civil and military purposes. In her 2007 book 'The Shock Doctrine', Naomi Klein points out that Israel's "technology sector, much of it linked to security, now makes up 60 percent of all exports."

Angela Godfrey-Goldstein, a human rights activist with the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions in Jerusalem, said: "I often ask myself 'what is the glue binding relations between the EU and Israel, Britain and Israel and America and Israel?' One of the things must be the joint work on what is called anti-terrorism."

She argued, though, that actions taken by Israel with the official objective of fighting terrorism are counter-productive. Israel has cited security reasons for its economic blockade of Gaza, under which power supplies and basic provisions have been denied to Gaza's 1.5 million inhabitants.

"The talk of fighting against terror has to be taken with a large pinch of salt," she said. "It is very disturbing that the Israeli government is starving people in Gaza, that is has created ghettoes in Gaza, and that has created other ghettoes in the West Bank. It is not doing anything to build trust. It has not ceased building settlements and it has not dismantled illegal outposts."

Poverty in the Palestinian territories has reached "unprecedented levels" because they have been held under an "economic siege" for almost seven years, a United Nations body has found.

During 2006 the number of Palestinians living in 'deep poverty' almost doubled to more than 1 million. Some 46 percent of public sector employees do not have enough food to meet their basic needs, with 53 percent of households in the Gaza reporting that their incomes declined in the last year by more than half.

This data is contained in a report, released Aug. 30, by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

It stated that an ostensible Israeli policy of 'separating' the Palestinian authorities from Arab and world markets by restricting the movement of people and goods has "squeezed the economy to a size smaller than a decade ago."

The Palestinians' reliance on imports as a proportion of their gross domestic product rose to 86 percent last year -- up from 75 percent in 2005, equating to the loss of 500 million dollars to the economy.

UNCTAD also complained that Israel declined to hand over more than 800 million dollars in tax revenues it had purportedly collected for the Palestinian Authority during 2006. Because of this refusal -- the second since 2002 -- the authorities' revenues shrank to under 600 million dollars, half what they were in 2005.

The report's publication coincided with a UN-sponsored conference on resolving the Middle East conflict in Brussels.

Controversially, the conference, which featured campaigners from the international Palestinian solidarity movement, was described as anti-Israel in some press reports.

Yet this allegation was dismissed by Paul Badji, a Senegalese diplomat who chairs the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People. "It is not anti-Israel to defend the rights of Palestinians," he said.

Leila Shahid, delegate general of Palestine to the European Union, reminded the conference that it is 40 years since Israel began "the longest occupation in contemporary history."

Delivering a statement on behalf of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, she said that by setting up 550 permanent and mobile checkpoints, Israel has turned the West Bank into "a group of isolated cantons, while over 11,000 Palestinians, including elected representatives and municipal council members, languish in prison, and targeted assassinations continue."

Pierre Galand from the European Coordination of Committees and Associations for Palestine said he did not believe that the U.S. President George W. Bush and his administration could "do peace a favour by granting 30 billion dollars of military aid to Israel, an increase of about a quarter of the American military aid to the Israeli state for the next ten years.

"We do not believe either that Germany aided peace in the Middle East when delivering in August 2006, during the war against Lebanon, two submarines with nuclear capacity and a 4,500 km radius of action," he added.

But Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian envoy to the UN, welcomed efforts by Washington to convene a Middle East peace conference.

"There is no question that the U.S. is a very powerful country and very influential in our region," he told IPS. "Therefore, its participation in brokering a conference for the autumn could possibly be very constructive. It could help to get all the parties to the conflict to move in the right direction."

Jamal Juma, coordinator of the Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign in Jerusalem, strongly denounced the 760 km 'security fence' that Israel has been constructing in the West Bank. This barrier is being constructed in defiance of the International Court of Justice. In 2004, the Hague-based court declared that the wall flouted international law by infringing on the rights of the Palestinians.

"What Israel is creating on the ground is a ghetto system worse than the apartheid system in South Africa," Juma said.

Angela Godfrey-Goldstein from the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions pointed out that both South Africa's former president Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu have drawn parallels between the plight of the Palestinians and that of their country's black majority under apartheid.

She urged an international boycott of Israel similar to that which led many governments to impose economic sanctions against South Africa during the 1980s.

Clare Short, the former secretary for international development in the British government, said that Israel has razed 18,000 Palestinian homes since 1967 and that "each demolition is a war crime."

Short noted that a free trade agreement between Israel and the European Union contains clauses relating to respect for human rights. She asked why these provisions have not been invoked "to insist on Israeli compliance with international law."

New York-based Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, a spokesman for Jews United Against Zionism, said that the conduct of Israeli forces in the Palestinian territories is helping foment anti-Semitism. He also took issue with Israeli politicians who cite the Holocaust to defend attacks on Palestinians, which they claim are necessary to protect Israel's security.

"The state of Israel is not doing Jews a favour," he told IPS. "My grandparents died in Auschwitz and it is wrong to dig them up and use them to oppress the Palestinian people. They should not be used as a pawn." (END/2007)

The European Union's foreign policy supremo Javier Solana this week declared himself "fully behind" the call for an international conference on the Middle East made recently by U.S. President George W. Bush. But is it time for the EU to cease being guided on the Israeli-Palestinian question by the United States, which as the main supplier of weapons to the Israeli military is partisan by definition?

Nathalie Tocci from the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels contends that the EU is "working on the margins of U.S.-dictated policies" in the Middle East and that this has proven counterproductive.

The influence of Washington in shaping Europe's stance has been especially marked in the Union's refusal to deal directly with Hamas. Even though that party won a democratic election in 2006, the EU has refused to have direct contacts with its representatives, as Hamas has been placed on the official lists of proscribed organisations in both Brussels and Washington.

Some EU governments -- such as France and Ireland -- are known to have queried if it is wise to shun Hamas completely. Yet the Union's ban on direct contacts has so far remained intact.

The EU has stated that Hamas must fulfil three conditions if dialogue is to take place: that it recognises Israel; accepts previously signed peace accords; and that it renounces violence.

According to Tocci, these criteria -- with the exception of renouncing violence -- are "legally dubious".

"The conditionality on Israel's recognition has no legal grounding in so far as only states and not political parties can recognise other states," she said.

Other commentators have noted how Hamas' participation in Palestinian Authority elections is tantamount to an acceptance of the 1993 Oslo accords, that led to the authority's foundation.

In June, the EU's foreign ministers agreed to resume direct aid to the Palestinian government, ending the suspension that had been put in place in protest at Hamas' election victory.

Oxfam, which had argued that the embargo on financial assistance was increasing levels of indebtedness faced by Palestinian civilians, is urging the EU to go beyond that decision and to now engage in dialogue with Hamas.

"There has to be a political pragmatism," Oxfam's Michael Bailey told IPS. "The EU has to try and get a normalisation of the situation in the occupied territories and we believe the Europeans should be encouraging everyone to get around the table. You don't have to like someone to talk to them; indeed, one of the aphorisms about diplomacy is that you don't talk to your friends, you talk to your enemies.

"But our main point is less political. The policy of the freeze on contacts with Hamas has had huge consequences for the civilian population."

Whereas the EU had been keen earlier on aid to promote the kind of economic development needed to create a viable Palestinian state, the bulk of its more recent assistance has been of an emergency nature. In 2005, humanitarian assistance comprised just 16 percent of all the Union's aid to Palestine, yet this climbed to 56 percent by the end of last year.

Israel's blockade of Gaza has necessitated an increase in emergency supplies. Some 80 percent of Gaza's industries have closed, with the result that 350,000 people have lost their principal source of income.

Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform in London, said that the efforts made by Hamas to ensure the release of the BBC's Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston have prompted a rethink of policy on contacts with Hamas in some EU countries, most notably Britain.

While he says it is "understandable" that the Union should baulk at engaging with a party that has a history of rocket attacks and suicide bombs on Israel, he feels that the preferential treatment given by the EU to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah is exacerbating tensions in the territories.

"The EU should recognise that the policy of boycotting Hamas by showering favours on Fatah in the West Bank has contributed to radicalising Hamas and thus provoking Fatah's overthrow in Gaza," Grant said.

"The economic isolation of Gaza is worsening an already dire humanitarian situation, accentuated by Israel shutting most of the border crossings most of the time. And so long as the EU is seen to reject the outcome of legitimately-conducted elections, it exposes itself to accusations of double standards and reduces its credibility in the eyes of many Arabs."

He suggests that the Union should learn from an example set within its own borders -- the dialogue that has put a halt to most forms of political violence in Northern Ireland.

"The very process of dealing with Hamas could have a transformational effect on the organisation, as was the case with the talks between the British government and the Irish Republican Army, though that process did not deliver results for more than 10 years. Evidently, EU-Hamas talks may not produce a positive outcome. But neither the U.S. nor Israel can claim that the status quo is doing much to enhance the security of Israelis."

Betty Hunter from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in Britain says that the EU has misrepresented the clashes between Hamas and Fatah in Gaza and that it has not been sufficiently robust in denouncing human rights abuses by the Israeli army.

"The EU could have played a constructive role," she told IPS. "There are representatives of the European Commission in East Jerusalem, so they know what's going on. But to characterise the Hamas takeover of Gaza as a military coup is not to understand the situation there. Of course, people don't want Hamas to be in control of Gaza but they are creating security internally. Meanwhile, Israel continues to kill people and bomb Gaza indiscriminately.

"Abbas appears to receive massive support from the EU, the U.S. and Israel, while internally it is questionable whether he can sustain an ongoing authority. We really think that the EU should take this on board."