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.”

At least four people have been injured in an explosion at a Hamas training camp in the southern Gaza Strip, according to Palestinian health officials and witnesses.

The blast near the town of Khan Yunis late on Tuesday reportedly destroyed the base and it was still on fire about one hour later.

It was not immediately clear what caused the explosion, but the Israeli military said it was looking into reports of the incident.

Dr Moaiya Hassanain of the Palestinian health ministry told The Associated Press news agency that two of the five wounded were in critical condition.

He said that all five were fighters from the armed wing of the Hamas movement, which seized full control of Gaza last year after pushing out security forces loyal to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president.

Last weekend, scores of members of Abbas's Fatah party were detained in the Gaza Strip after a bombing killed five Hamas fighters and a young girl.

Hamas said that Fatah carried out the attack to undermine its rule, but Fatah has denied any involvement in the blast and said the attack was part of an internal conflict within Hamas.

Hamas and Israel agreed to a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip last month which saw the Palestinian group halt the firing of rockets and mortars, while Israel stopped raids into the territory.

Six Palestinians have been killed in three Israeli air strikes targeting the Gaza Strip, according to medics and witnesses. Five people were killed and several others were wounded on Tuesday in one air raid near Qarara village east of the southern town of Khan Yunis, Muawiya Hassanein, the head of Gaza emergency services, said.

"The number of dead has risen to five and a number of civilians have been wounded in an Israeli air strike that targeted a civilian car in the Qarara area," he said. The Israeli army confirmed carrying out air raids, saying that one attack - carried out in southern Gaza - destroyed a blue Subaru.

Islamic Jihad said all the five victims were its members. Another two Israeli air attacks in the nearby town of Deir al-Balah killed a sixth person and wounded five people, local Palestinian hospital officials said. "There were three aerial attacks ... two of them were against vehicles carrying terror operatives and one of them was against terror operatives without a vehicle," an Israeli army spokeswoman said. One of those killed in Tuesday's Israeli raids was Moataz Doghmush, a senior fighter in the Army of Islam, an armed faction believed to be linked to al-Qaeda, Hassanein said. In response, Palestinian fighters fired seven rockets into Israel, the Israeli military said. The exchange of fire came hours before Cairo announced that Israel and Hamas had agreed to an Egyptian-mediated ceasefire agreement to take effect on Thursday. At least 515 people have been killed since Israel and the Palestinians relaunched peace negotiations at a conference in the US city of Annapolis in November, most of them Palestinian fighters, according to an AFP count.

Students from Gaza who were awarded scholarships to study in the US but prevented from travelling by Israeli authorities, have now been allowed to leave Gaza to begin their study programme. The US consulate in Jerusalem said on Monday that the scholarships - earlier "redirected" by the Fulbright student programme - will be reinstated.

Fulbright said it had taken the decision after the students were not able to leave Gaza to attend the course in the US. The Fulbright Student Programme brings citizens of other countries to the US for masters degrees or PhD studies at US universities and other institutions.

Speaking on Monday, Abdelrahman Abdulla, one of the seven successful applicants, said: "Yesterday I received a letter from US consulate-general in Jerusalem, saying that they are talking with the Israeli government in order to give us exit permits from Gaza, so that we can reach the consulate in Jerusalem. "Then they [Israeli authorities] will be instructed to complete our placements." Israeli view Mark Regev, spokesman from the Israeli ministry of foreign affairs, told Al Jazeera that he "wasn't aware there was a problem" with this case of the movement of Gaza students. He said Israel intially received no notification from Fulbright that the students in question were "bonafide". Regev said that Israel has an "interest in seeing people like this going to study abroad". "Ultimately, in view of creating a Palestinian leadership composed of individuals exposed to pluralist countries like the US," he said. Arye Mekel, an Israeli foreign ministry spokesman, said a few of the Fulbright students had recently left Gaza through the Erez crossing. US officials had no comment on the statement and it was not immediately possible to obtain independent confirmation. Right to education Israel has tightened its military cordon around the Gaza Strip since Hamas took over the territory almost a year ago. Few Palestinians are allowed to leave the territory, including some who are gravely ill. Commenting on the scholarships controversy, Abdulla said: "This is all about our right to education. "It is really unbelievable that those educated people in Palestine could be denied their higher education. "It was very difficult to get the scholarship. There were many exams and tests and its really difficult to go through this process again." Abdullah said that "as Palestinians, we are looking forward to the Palestinian state". "I highly believe that with our efforts, those young Palestinians can plan for their future to contribute to the movement of their country and the Palestinian community as a whole," he said. "It's our goal in life." Background The issue hit the headlines after Abdullah and the six other Gaza students received on Thursday an email saying their grants had been "redirected" by the Fulbright programme, because of Israel's closing of Gaza. Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, who said she was a "huge supporter of the Fulbrights", suggested she disapproved of the move to reallocate the money for the seven students. "I can tell you it was a surprise to me," she said while on a visit to Iceland on Friday. "If you cannot engage young people and give complete horizons to their expectations and their dreams, I don't know that there would be any future for Palestine."

Hundreds of business and political leaders are attending a conference aimed at boosting the stagnant economy in the occupied West Bank through private investment. The first ever Palestine Investment Conference, which started on Wednesday in Bethlehem, is aimed at encouraging investor interest by showcasing business opportunities and projects.

Robert Kimmitt, the deputy US treasury secretary, is leading a US delegation to the three-day event. Kimmitt said that the US administration hopes the conference will bolster a push to establish a Palestinian state.

About 1,200 businesspeople, including 500 Arab and foreign participants, are expected to attend the conference. Amongst those attending are Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, and Tony Blair, the current envoy of the Middle East diplomatic Quartet, which is monitoring the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Job creation About 109 projects, costing about $2bn, will be presented by Palestinian business leaders to potential investors. Hassan Abu Libdeh, the conference director, said: "Two billion dollars may seem like a modest sum but in Palestine it would lead to the creation of 50,000 jobs over a period of three to five years if these projects are undertaken. "Most of the projects to be presented involve infrastructure and housing." Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, said he hoped the conference would "strengthen the foundations for peace and security in the region," in an opening speech to those attending. He said the event was important in light of the challenges faced by Palestinians. "We hope the conference will succeed, that we have some success here," Abbas said. The idea of the Bethlehem gathering was launched at a Paris conference of donors in December. The donors pledged $7.7bn in assistance for the Palestinian territories, but by early May only $717 million was actually paid out. The World Bank says that since 2000, the Palestinian economy turned from one being driven by investment and private sector productivity to one sustained by government spending and donor aid.

Stagnation ahead

In a report published last month, the World Bank said Palestinian economic growth would be stagnant throughout 2008. "After a good performance in the latter 1990s, the fragile Palestinian economy entered a gradual downward cycle of crisis and dependence," the report said. The West Bank's economy is crippled by more than 500 Israeli roadblocks which hamper movement throughout the occupied territory. Israel, which set up the barriers after the second Palestinian intifada in 2000, says the restrictions are necessary for security reasons. Israel recently announced the removal of some of roadblocks.