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.”

On a breezy hilltop in sight of the Lebanese border, a village last populated 65 years ago is being reclaimed from the dead for the living. Vegetables and herbs have been planted amid the rubble; a couple of donkeys graze on spring grass; traditional food is cooked and eaten in a makeshift structure next to the Church of Our Lady, where mass is celebrated for up to 200 worshippers on the first Saturday of every month.

This is Iqrit, a Palestinian Christian village in northern Galilee, whose inhabitants left in the bitter war that followed the declaration of the state of Israel in 1948, and who have never been permitted to return to their land and razed homes.

But in recent months, a group of young men, grandsons of Iqrit's original residents, have moved back in an attempt to reclaim and rebuild the village.

And as Palestinians commemorate on Wednesday the Nakba, or catastrophe, of the loss of their land to Israel 65 years ago, work is being completed on a proposal for around 500 homes to be built on the site for the descendants of Iqrit's inhabitants, 90% of whom wish to return to the village. The plan is expected to be published in September.

What is unusual about this demand for the "right of return" is that the villagers and their descendants are Israeli citizens, mostly living in the area, rather than refugees in Palestine and in the diaspora.

In November 1948, six months after the state of Israel was declared, the new Israeli army arrived at Iqrit to tell the villagers they must leave because the area was dangerous. Most of the 490 inhabitants were transferred to a nearby village, taking only basic necessities, in the belief they would be gone for two weeks. But the area was declared a military zone and the villagers were forbidden from returning.

The people of Iqrit took their case to Israel's newly constituted supreme court, which ruled in July 1951 that their evacuation was illegal and they must be permitted to return to the village. But on Christmas Eve of that year, Israeli soldiers demolished the village, leaving only the church and the cemetery intact. Later, the village land was taken for state use.

Since then, the villagers have fought a legal battle that ended 10 years ago with a final supreme court ruling rejecting their demand to be allowed to reclaim their land. The original villagers and their descendants – now around 1,500 people scattered across northern Israel – are allowed only to hold services in the church and bury their dead in the cemetery. "We are refugees in our own country," said Nemi Ashkar of the Iqrit community association.

Last summer, around a dozen young men decided to take matters into their own hands. "At the moment Iqrit people have the right to return only in a coffin, but we want to live here," said Walaa Sbait, 26, a schoolteacher in Haifa, 40 miles away.

The group planted young saplings and built a chicken coop, which Sbait said the Israeli authorities had demolished. "They are making the chickens refugees, too," he said, adding that the two donkeys had also been threatened with eviction.

The group consists of university students, factory and restaurant workers, and teachers. "Of course, it would be more comfortable to sip espresso in a coffee shop in Haifa, but we have a belief in our right to live here," said Sbait.

The Iqrit community association says it has been offered support by Israeli politicians on both the right and left, and from Israeli artists and intellectuals. Father Souhail Khoury, the priest of the church, says he grew up listening to his parents reminisce about their lost land. "We are all in different villages and towns now, but this is the place where we still meet every month as a family," he said. "This is the place we call home."

In a kitchen in the "martyrs' quarter" of the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem, one of the toughest places in the West Bank, Islam Abu Aouda is preparing a soft dough of yoghurt, oil and flour. Soon she will fill small pockets with chopped spinach, sumac and lemon, and bake them in the oven. The mouthwatering parcels are called krass; I ate four but I wanted 14.

Less than 50 miles away, Reem Daloul is also kneading dough in a makeshift kitchen in Gaza City, lit only by a small window during one of the coastal enclave's regular eight-hour power cuts. This dough is for small cigar- and horseshoe-shaped pastries, filled with za'atar, a blend of spices, or soft, salty cheese mixed with hot chilli.

These two Palestinian women are divided by walls, fences and checkpoints, but connected by a love of traditional food – and the will to use this to improve their circumstances. Islam, whose six children include a 13-year-old disabled son, is part of a small collective of women, nearly all mothers of disabled children, who offer cookery classes and homestays in the Aida camp; Reem is part of the Zeitun Kitchen women's co-operative, which caters for weddings and family parties in Gaza.

The tastes and aromas of traditional Palestinian food are at the heart of every home, where vividly flavoured dishes are created from scratch using the freshest ingredients, herbs, spices and olive oil. For foreigners, it's not easy to find this food: restaurants and street stalls concentrate on the staples of grilled meat, salads, falafel and hummus; real Palestinian cuisine is found at home.

Invariably women rule the home kitchens: mothers, daughters, grandmothers, aunts and cousins cooking together while passing on techniques and swapping recipes. The restaurants and street stalls are the domain of men. The two spheres do not overlap.

Among the most common home-cooked dishes are maqluba, meat and vegetables cooked in a spicy broth, served with nuts, herbs and yoghurt; baba ghanoush or muta'abal, a dip of roasted aubergine, garlic, lemon and tahini; mujadara, rice and lentils topped with caramelised onions; and musakhan, chicken roasted with sumac and served with sweet onions on taboon bread.

In Gaza, traditional dishes often revolve around fish and seafood caught off its 25-mile Mediterranean coastline and tend to be fiery, reflecting an Egyptian influence. Recipes include Zibdiyit gambara, spicy shrimps cooked in a clay pot topped with pine nuts; habari ma'daggit il samak, small squid stuffed with dill, coriander and chilli; sayadiyya, a classic dish of spiced rice and fish; fattit ajir, roasted watermelon salad with green chillies and dill.

These dishes are to be found in an enticing new cookbook, The Gaza Kitchen, which combines recipes with stories from Gaza and the political context of the residents' hardships. One of its two authors, Laila el-Haddad, a Palestinian-American, who spent her childhood summers in Gaza, says: "Food was always a way for me to stay connected to my heritage and Palestinian identity.

"Even in such a small place there is remarkable regional distinction which generation after generation holds on to with great pride. In general, it's spicy, piquant, herby, sour and very earthy, relying on fresh herbs, green dill, dill seeds and a love for all things sour – sour plums or pomegranates, or lemon juice – and hot."

The women of the Aida refugee camp have also produced a small booklet of their recipes, called Zaaki, in collaboration with the Noor Women Empowerment Group, a tiny Bethlehem-based grassroots project.

While chopping tomatoes and cucumbers into tiny chunks for a traditional Arabic salad and roasting whole aubergines over a naked flame, Islam, 32, says that the cookery project stemmed from a need to raise money for consumables and equipment for the women's disabled children.

But the first task was to get the women together in a supportive network. "Sometimes, families hide their children in the house because they are ashamed," she says. Some disabled children never go to school. The cookery classes allowed the mothers to make a small income without abandoning their domestic responsibilities. At first the women, brought up in a tradition of Palestinian hospitality, recoiled from charging strangers to eat their food. And their husbands were initially reluctant for men to be admitted to the classes.

"At the beginning, everything was really difficult," says Islam, scraping the smoky aubergine flesh into a bowl with lemon juice, garlic, tahini and salt. "There was a lot of gossiping about the project in the camp, with foreigners coming to our home, but now people are supportive."

Islam, who married at 16 and whose husband's brother and sister were both shot dead in the house in Israeli military raids, is learning English so she can deal with foreign visitors without the need for translation. Her husband is unemployed, like most of the men in the camp, where many families depend on food aid. Despite the traditions and skills of home-cooking, Aida children suffer from high rates of calcium deficiency, anaemia and tooth decay.

In Gaza, almost 1 million people – more than half the population – receive basic food assistance from the United Nations. The 13 women of the Zeitun Kitchen co-operative have learned to adapt to the privations of life in Gaza: shortages of power and cooking oil; Israel's ban on many foodstuffs during the three years in which a stringent blockade was in place; the fluctuations in black market supplies through the tunnels to Egypt; the destruction of and restrictions on access to prime agricultural land; the imposition of strict limits on how far from shore Gaza's fishermen can lower their nets.

Olive oil is just one example. An essential ingredient in most Palestinian dishes, the uprooting of olive trees in both Gaza and the West Bank has made the once-abundant oil prohibitively expensive for many families. Now it is often used just to dress a dish, rather than create it.

"We either use a lower quality oil, or we import olive oil from Syria, which adds to the price," says Jamila Daloul, who founded the Zeitun Kitchen eight years ago. "Even when the farmers re-plant the trees, it takes three years for them to bear fruit, and at least 10 years to good olives."

On the day I visited the Zeitun Kitchen, there was no power. "We used to have a generator, but it broke. The power goes off every other day for up to eight hours. We make everything fresh so we don't depend on fridges," says Jamila.

The dish in preparation at the start of our visit was maftoul, the Palestinian version of couscous. A dough of flour, salt and water is pressed over a flat sieve to create fine grains which are then steamed with chopped onions, peppers, dill and lemon. Maftoul is traditionally served with a meat and vegetable stew.

The women gossip and laugh as they cook, and occasionally disagree over technique. Reem, whose speed in rolling and shaping her dough doesn't compromise her perfectionism, remonstrates with a less careful colleague. But all is forgiven over an early lunch washed down with thick Arabic coffee and sweet mint tea.

Food is more than a mere necessity; it nurtures, and binds people to each other and their cultural identity. In their introduction to The Gaza Kitchen, Laila el-Haddad and her co-author Maggie Schmitt say they conceived the cookbook as a way of allowing them "to tell the story of the place in a very special way. Nearly everyone in Gaza to whom we explained the project understood it immediately: to talk about food and cooking is to talk about the dignity of daily life, about history and heritage in a place where these very things have often been disparaged or actively erased.

"Approached for an interview, Gazans braced themselves to explain one more time – gently, patiently – the impossible political situation of the Strip. When they discovered we did not want to talk about political parties or border crossings but about lentil dishes, there was a moment of astonished delight before they launched into the topic. Passers-by crowded around, each proffering a hometown recipe: 'No, no, it's much better if you add the onions at the end …' Food is a passionate subject."

Israel is expected to press ahead with construction of the vast West Bank barrier around a convent near the Christian town of Beit Jala, following a ruling from a special appeals committee.

The route of the barrier will separate a small community of elderly nuns at the Cremisan convent from 75% of their land and from a nearby monastery with which it has close ties. The playground of a nursery and a school run by the Cremisan sisters will be bordered on three sides by the wall.

More than 50 Palestinian families will lose free access to their agricultural land, causing economic hardship to the dwindling Christian community.

The campaign against the route of the barrier at Cremisan was taken up by the UK foreign secretary, William Hague, and the archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols. In a letter disclosed by the Guardian last year, Hague told Nichols that he shared his "concerns about the problem of land confiscation by the Israeli authorities affecting the people of Beit Jala and similar Palestinian communities in the occupied territories".

Following a seven-year legal campaign, Israel's special appeals committee this week ruled in favour of the route, which leaves the convent on the Palestinian side of the barrier and the monastery and land belonging to the convent and local families on the Israeli side.

According to the Society of St Yves, a Catholic human rights organisation that represented the nuns, the committee decided that the proposed route was "a reasonable solution that balances Israel's security needs on one hand and freedom of religion and the right to education on the other".

However, the society said the ruling was "highly problematic and unjust". It failed to properly address "the violation of freedom of religion, the right to education as well as the economical damage caused for a unique Christian minority in Beit Jala by the construction of the wall," it said. It is considering an appeal to Israel's supreme court.

The UK government provided indirect funding for the legal case. It says Israel is entitled to build a barrier but it should lie on the internationally recognised 1967 Green Line, not on confiscated Palestinian land. About 85% of the barrier is inside the West Bank. The route is harming the prospects of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to Britain.

In his Christmas Eve homily in 2011, Nichols offered prayers in support of the community's "legal battle to protect their land and homes from further expropriation by Israel".

Last year Israel's defence ministry told the Guardian: "The route of the security fence in the Beit Jala region is based purely on security considerations. This portion is there solely to keep terror out of Jerusalem."

Israeli military authorities have closed their investigation into the killing of 10 members of one family in an air strike during November's eight-day war in Gaza, saying no criminal offence was suspected.

The home of the Dalou family was destroyed the conflict, resulting in the biggest single incident of civilian deaths. Among the 12 victims were four Dalou siblings aged between one and seven, and five women, including one aged 80; two of the dead were neighbours of the family. Images of the children's corpses, squashed together on a morgue tray and covered in dust and debris, were shown around the world.

The decision by Israel's Military Advocate General (MAG) to take no further action follows a special commission that examined about 80 incidents during the conflict which involved the deaths of "uninvolved civilians" or led to claims of alleged misconduct.

In 65 of those cases, the MAG "did not find a basis for opening a criminal investigation". It ordered further investigation in the remaining cases.

According to a report released by the Israeli military, the MAG found that in an unspecified number of cases "there is indeed basis for the claim that as a result of IDF [Israeli Defence Forces] attacks, uninvolved civilians were killed or injured".

This was attributed to "unintended damage" or "operational errors".

The report said: "This result, while regrettable, does not indicate a violation of the Laws of Armed Conflict, and stems directly from actions of Palestinian terrorist organisations which have chosen to conduct their unlawful activities from within the civilian population."

It also described the deaths of the Dalou family as "regrettable", saying the air strike was targeted at "a senior terrorist and several other terrorists … who constituted a military target". It went on: "Operations staff had not foreseen that, as a result of the attack, collateral damage would be caused to uninvolved civilians to the extent alleged."

Surviving members of the Dalou family have insisted there were no militants among them. Three weeks after the air strike, Bodour al-Dalou, 25, who lost her mother, brother, two sisters, a sister-in-law, an aunt and four nephews and nieces, told the Guardian: "There were no fighters in the house. I have no idea why the Israelis targeted us. I have heard they said it was a mistake, but what difference does that make?"

In response to the MAG report, Human Rights Watch said asserting that consequences of an attack were unintended or a mistake did not mean it was lawful. "In fact, 'unintended damage' and 'mistakes' that kill civilians can indeed be violations of the laws of war, if the attackers failed to take all feasible precautions before attacking to ensure their attacks would not cause disproportionate civilian harm," said HRW's Bill Van Esveld.

The Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights condemned the MAG's decision to close the Dalou and other cases. "Israel's legal system is used as a smokescreen, to provide an illusion of investigative rigour, while in fact providing systematic cover for widespread violations of international law," it said in a statement.

About 160 Palestinians and six Israelis were killed during the conflict. The IDF said it had targeted approximately 1,500 sites inside Gaza during the eight days, and a similar number of rockets were launched by militants in Gaza with more than half reaching Israel.

The MAG concluded that the death of the son of a BBC picture editor on the first day of the conflict was not the result of IDF action. A UN report last month said it was likely that 11-month-old Omar Misharawi was killed by a stray Palestinian rocket.