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.”

JERUSALEM: Friday was a day of threats, protest and rhetoric in Israel's conflict with Hamas, with considerably less violence and death than over the previous two days, when some 33 Palestinians died, five of them children, and one Israeli died in the border town of Sderot.

As tens of thousands of Gazans protested on Friday, and the Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniya, brushed aside Israeli threats to aim at political leaders, another Palestinian died from wounds received on Thursday. An Israeli Army operation targeting rocket-launching squads near Jabaliya wounded four people, including two children and their grandmother, according to Dr. Moawiya Hassanain of the Gazan Health Ministry.

Five Palestinians were wounded when the rocket they were attempting to launch exploded.

At least 13 rockets were launched on Friday from Gaza toward Israel, the Israeli Army said. Five landed in Sderot, one directly hitting a house and lightly wounding a woman. Four others were treated for shock. Two rockets hit the Sderot cemetery.

But there were no industrially manufactured Katyusha-style rockets fired on Friday, after at least eight, smuggled in from Egypt, were fired Thursday on the Israeli city of Ashkelon, a city of 120,000 people about 16 kilometers, or 10 miles, from northern Gaza. Israel says the rockets were probably manufactured in Iran, but the Gazans lack the mobile launchers normally used for these rockets.

Putting Ashkelon under a persistent threat of rocket attack raises the stakes considerably for Israel and is increasing pressure on the government to respond in force. Israel has activated a rocket-warning system for Ashkelon like the one for Sderot, which gives residents about 20 seconds to find shelter.

The Israeli deputy defense minister, Matan Vilnai, told army radio that Israel would respond to escalation and "we will not shy away from any action" to halt the rocket fire on Israeli civilians.

Vilnai called Hamas leaders irresponsible, and said they knew that "by intensifying the rocket fire and extending their reach they are bringing onto themselves a worse catastrophe, as we will use all means to defend ourselves," including, he said, a major ground operation.

Vilnai used the Hebrew word "shoah," which means holocaust or disaster, and is rarely used for anything other than the Nazi extermination of the Jews.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been reluctant to order a major ground operation in Gaza, in part because it would be difficult to stop rocket fire without reoccupying most of Gaza. With Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice due to visit Israel next week after a previous stop in Egypt, which has been counseling restraint, Olmert will be reluctant to order a major move now.

The army would prefer warmer weather in any case, which would mean clearer skies. But Israel has been sending messages to its allies that it may have to resort to a ground operation. Defense Minister Ehud Barak said in the messages that "Israel is not keen on an offensive, but Hamas is leaving us no choice," according to the daily Yediot Ahronot.

Barak visited Ashkelon on Friday and said Hamas "will be the one to bear the cost of our response." But he also told Western diplomats that a major offensive was not "imminent," a diplomat said on the condition of anonymity.

Khaled Abdel Shafi, an economist in Gaza, said in a telephone interview that the situation was getting worse there, with Gaza essentially still closed to normal commerce, with severe shortages of oil, gasoline, medicine and chlorine for drinking water. "I cannot see a horizon with a solution, and there is no chance that the crossings are going to be opened again," he said. "Israeli military operations are still taking place, and they only cause more poverty, despair and will eventually cause a Palestinian reaction."

Abdel Shafi criticized both Hamas and Fatah. "They are both attached to their political stances, but the victim is the Palestinian citizen who is suffering from poverty and this division," he said, adding that ordinary Gazans felt abandoned.

In parallel to the fighting, there has been a diplomatic effort between Egypt and Israel, aided by the European Union and the United States, to negotiate a package deal between Israel and Hamas. The idea, according to European and Israeli diplomats, would be to reopen the Gaza-Egyptian border at Rafah under renewed European monitoring, allow Gazan exports through Rafah, push the Egyptians to patrol the border better, release a captured Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, and arrange a cease-fire in Gaza, with Hamas promising to stop rockets in return for a halt in Israeli military action.

But even a cease-fire does not solve the problem of Gaza, since Hamas would continue to build up what is essentially a Palestinian army on the Hezbollah model.

In Gaza, at the Hamas rally, a legislator, Fathi Hamad, urged the Hamas military wing to develop Qassam rockets capable of hitting Tel Aviv.

Haniya called the threat of an Israeli offensive "craziness and hysteria" and said: "Gaza today faces a real war, a crazy war led by the enemy against our people." He accused Arab governments of "encouraging the Israeli aggression" through silence and Washington for supporting Israeli attacks as "legitimate self-defense."

But the Israeli opposition leader, Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud, said that Israel had not hit Hamas hard enough to force the group to halt the rocket fire.

"We've not exacted a sufficient cost from the Hamas terrorist organization," he told CNN in New York. "I think we have been fighting essentially a war of attrition. They do something, we do something and so on. And the nature of deterrence, of course, is that you change the rules."

Israeli officials on Friday rejected Arab complaints that they were not committed to a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians and said Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had responded positively to the Arab League initiative as a basis for negotiations.

Mark Regev, the spokesman for Mr. Olmert, was responding to recent Arab statements, published in The New York Times, warning Israel that unless it accepted the 2002 proposal — for full recognition of Israel in return for complete withdrawal to the 1967 boundaries — the deal would be withdrawn.

Israel, he said, was engaged in serious negotiations with the Palestinians in order to settle the conflict on the basis of two independent and sovereign states.

“Israel has responded positively to the Arab League initiative,” Mr. Regev said. “We’ve praised the initiative, and we said we were willing to have negotiations with the Arab world on its basis, and the prime minister has praised it.”

Talks with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and negotiators go on “almost daily,” Mr. Regev said.

Another Israeli official, who spoke on condition of anonymity for diplomatic reasons, played down the comments made by Muhammad Sobeih, the assistant secretary general of the Arab League in charge of the Palestinian issue.

The Israeli official said Amr Moussa, the head of the Arab League, and his staff were generally more “critical and negative than Arab League foreign ministers.” He described Mr. Moussa and his staff as “more Nasserite” — implying an older form of Arab nationalism and rejection of Israel — and said European interlocutors had told the Israelis, “Don’t expect much from Amr Moussa.”

Mr. Sobeih said the Arab leaders were planning to reiterate support for their initiative at an Arab League meeting next month in Syria. But, he said, they will couple that support with “a message to Israel emphasizing the need to respond to the initiative; otherwise, Arab states will reassess the previous stage of peace.”

Mr. Sobeih was reflecting Arab unhappiness with the pace of the talks, a view shared by Mr. Abbas and his appointed prime minister, Salam Fayyad. They say they believe that Israel is in no hurry to finish the negotiations.

Israel, many Arabs and Palestinians believe, is insincere; the Palestinians, many Israelis believe, are not ready to make the compromises necessary for a real peace.

Also on Friday, about 10,000 Israelis gathered in the southern town of Sderot, a target of Palestinian rockets fired from Gaza, to show their solidarity with the citizens there by doing their weekend shopping in the town.

In Gaza, about 200 Palestinians protested against Danish newspapers that reprinted a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad.

Also in Gaza, a Hamas spokesman praised the European Union for passing a nonbinding resolution on Thursday urging Israel not to inflict “collective punishment” on Gazan civilians because of the rockets.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has asked to meet Mr. Olmert in part to discuss Gaza when they cross paths in Japan next week, Israeli and American officials said.

JERUSALEM: Israel hoped that by pulling its settlers and troops from Gaza in 2005, it would also leave behind responsibility for the Gazans. With the help of the West and more moderate Arab countries, the Palestinian Authority could begin to create a prosperous state, the new Palestine, as if the continuing Israeli occupation of the West Bank were somehow irrelevant.

It was another case of wishful thinking. As rockets continue to fall on Israeli towns, and Israeli politicians call for harsh retaliation, Israel faces an acute quandary in Gaza, with delicate political, military and moral dilemmas. Israel is trying to contain a new form of polity: a non-sovereign, semi-occupied, semi-state controlled by Hamas, considered a terrorist group by the United States and the European Union and officially committed to the destruction of the very country obligated to provide it with fuel, electricity, water and food.

Israeli politicians, under pressure from the public, are demanding harsh retaliation, the assassination of Hamas leaders and a major military incursion to end the rocket fire. Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had been preaching patience.

But now, with the Winograd report on the failures of Olmert's war against Hezbollah safely behind him, there is evidence of a government "information campaign" to try to justify a major military operation. Israeli officials argue that the rockets are bad enough, but that Hamas is becoming Hezbollah, a sophisticated military organization threatening regional stability.

Since June, when Hamas forces routed Fatah in Gaza, "this is Hamastan," said a close Olmert ally, Haim Ramon. "This is not a terrorist group hiding in a state. They are the state, and they are a terrorist organization that refuses to recognize Israel's right to exist." But of course Gaza is not a state, but part of an occupied Palestinian entity, which is Israel's problem.

Ramon, a former Labor Party member, supports peace talks with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and a simultaneous "war against Hamastan," and he, too, is talking tough. "No society in the world provides fuel and electricity to a country rocketing it," he said, but Israeli cuts in supplies to Gaza have already brought fierce criticism about "collective punishment" of civilians and even cautions from Washington.

Ramon would go further: Israel should, after warning civilians to leave, "immediately attack" the areas from which the rockets are launched.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni took diplomats to the Gaza border on Wednesday and warned them that "the situation in the region is unbearable, and the threat of terror from Gaza is growing larger from year to year." She said that the problem was not simply the rockets, "but also the strengthening of the terror organizations," aided by the Hamas breakout into Egypt last month. "Israel," she said, "must act to reduce these threats."

Fine, but how exactly? Shlomo Brom, a retired general at the Institute for National Security Studies, says that none of the military options is especially attractive. To stop rockets, as the army learned in Lebanon, Israel must occupy the launching zones.

But the range of the rockets is improving.

"That means, for all practical purposes, occupying most of the Gaza Strip," he said, "and no one in Israel other than the fringe right has the appetite to reoccupy the Gaza Strip." Hamas has weapons and built fortifications, "and there are thousands of terrorists willing to fight you." The Israeli forces would win easily, Brom said, "but it takes a long time, and for what? To regain rule over 1.5 million Palestinians? What's the exit strategy?"

Such an operation could also make it impossible for Abbas to continue peace talks with Israel, no matter how much he would like to see Hamas weakened or removed from power.

Other military options include an intensification of current operations against Hamas, but that would not stop the rockets. Ground operations with limited goals - making sure Ashkelon is out of range, for example - could mean retaking northern Gaza and a wide swath next to Gaza's border with Egypt, to diminish the smuggling.

More effective would be the kind of retaliation world opinion is no longer likely to accept, Brom said, "doing to them what they do to us," launching effectively untargeted rockets at Gaza City or the Jabaliya refugee camp in return for every one fired at Sderot. Killing Hamas leaders can deter but have unexpected consequences, like a new campaign of suicide bombings.

Amos Oz, the most famous writer in Israel, warned the other day: "Israel must not fall into the trap that Hamas is laying for us and march into Gaza," adding: "The occupying force will not have a single quiet day. Nor will Sderot."

There is another option, Oz noted, which would be to negotiate the cease-fire with Hamas that its leaders have been proposing.

Diplomats say that Egypt, stung by the border crisis, is working on an ambitious Israeli-Hamas package plan - an exchange of prisoners, including Corporal Gilad Shalit and possibly the jailed Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti; a long-term cease-fire in Gaza; and a reopening of the Egyptian-Gaza border under the eyes of Abbas's presidential guard.

Israel is likely to be cautious. To do a deal with Hamas would further undermine Abbas, when Israel and Western policy is to weaken Hamas and strengthen Abbas.

To arrange a long-term cease-fire might bring quiet to Sderot, but it would allow Hamas to regroup, rearm, continue to improve its military capacities and strengthen its political and security hold over Gaza.

Still, as Bernard Avishai, author of "The Hebrew Republic," points out, Israel has a long-term cease-fire with Hezbollah, just as rejectionist as Hamas, coupled with a disengagement of forces. "You have to stop the cycle of violence," he said. "Israel can't win a war in Gaza, but it can't lose a Gazan peace."

A former national security adviser, Giora Eiland, wants to use the threat of harsh military and economic sanctions not to defeat Hamas, but convince it to stop the rocket fire - or else.

Eiland proposes a deal: cease-fire, prisoner exchange, normal fuel and electricity supplies, a reopened, monitored Egyptian border. If Hamas refuses, however, he proposes a very hard stick: the bombing of Gaza's ministries, police stations and infrastructure; a halt in the supply of goods, fuel and electricity; and the economic separation of Gaza from the West Bank.

Elegant, perhaps, but unlikely, given the international outcry that would follow. A better answer, of course, would be a rapid peace treaty creating a Palestinian state, supported by the Arab League and isolating Hamas, with international troops helping to patrol the borders. But since both Israel and Hamas have little interest in a final settlement now, that seems like more wishful thinking.

A senior Israeli minister said Monday that his country hoped to reach agreement with the Palestinians on a “declaration of principles” for peace by the end of the year, but not on a detailed peace treaty.

The comments by Haim Ramon, a vice prime minister and a close ally of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, stated publicly what Israeli officials have said quietly for weeks now — that negotiating a final peace treaty this year with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, would be extremely difficult. They say that Mr. Abbas does not have the power to put a treaty into effect and that too detailed a treaty would also be likely to bring down Mr. Olmert’s government.

Already, Shas, a religious party in Mr. Olmert’s coalition, has warned that as soon as talks begin on how to divide Jerusalem, the party will leave the government. On Monday, the Shas chairman, Eli Yishai, said his party would leave if negotiations proceeded while rockets continued to be fired into Israel from Gaza.

“If there is any diplomatic progress in the negotiations with Palestinians beyond the current situation, and we are still under fire from Qassams and West Bank incidents, Shas will quit the government immediately,” Mr. Yishai said.

President Bush said last month on a visit here that his goal was to get both sides to sign a peace treaty before his term ends next January, and Mr. Abbas has said that a peace treaty by the end of the year is his goal. But Mr. Ramon said that he spoke to Mr. Bush during that visit and that Mr. Bush’s expectations were in line with Israel’s.

“I believe President Bush is not expecting a Palestinian state to be established by the end of the year,” Mr. Ramon said. “A declaration of principles will lead to a Palestinian state. It has to be detailed enough in order to implement it in the years that will come after 2008, two to three years after.”

The Bush comments had been greeted with some concern even by Palestinians aligned with Mr. Abbas and his appointed prime minister, Salam Fayyad. They worry that Mr. Abbas, Fatah and Mr. Fayyad, an independent, will all suffer politically if no peace treaty emerges.

Mr. Ramon said a declaration of principles would be much more detailed than the 2003 “road map” for peace. A declaration, he said, “will have to say what will be in Jerusalem, but not all the details.” If such a declaration can be negotiated, despite the threats from Shas, Mr. Ramon said, he expects the government to resign and to take the deal to the voters.

David Baker, a spokesman for Mr. Olmert, said: “If anyone doubts Israel’s sincerity, they’re mistaken. We are striving to get as far as we can. It should be clear to everyone that Israel is quite sincere about making progress.”

Mr. Ramon also spoke in tough terms about Gaza, saying that the government’s prime responsibility was to protect the Israeli citizens of Sderot, a town near Gaza that has borne the brunt of the rocket attacks, not to worry about the prosperity of Gaza, which is ruled by Hamas. He said Israel would defeat “the terrorist Hamas regime in Gaza” through military and economic pressure. “It will not happen in another two days, or in another two weeks, but we will bring about a solution to the Qassam rocket fire.”

The defense minister, Ehud Barak, said the army would take “any necessary step to return peace and security to the citizens of Sderot.” Israelis have been moved by the Twito brothers, Osher and Rami, who were seriously wounded on Saturday night when a Qassam rocket exploded near them in Sderot, as they stood at a cash machine to get money to celebrate the birthday of their father, Rafi.

Osher, 8, had his left leg amputated and was operated on again on Monday, and remains in intensive care on a ventilator, while Rami, 19, underwent an operation on Monday for breaks and shrapnel wounds to his legs, said Michal Shabtai, speaking for Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv. Both boys will have further operations.