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.”

The Islamic Hamas movement banned girls last month from riding behind men on motor scooters and forbade women from dancing at the opening of a folk museum. Girls in some public schools must wear headscarves and cloaks.

Signs of Hamas’s creeping Islamization are everywhere in Gaza, the Mediterranean coastal enclave that Hamas has run by itself since 2007. Gaza is already politically divided from the West Bank, the Palestinian territory administered by the secular Fatah movement.

“Ruling by itself, Hamas can stamp its ideas on everyone,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a political science professor at Gaza’s al-Azhar University. “Islamizing society has always been part of Hamas strategy.”

Hamas-Fatah infighting has diverted Palestinians from their quest for statehood and from presenting a united front at proposed U.S.-brokered peace talks with Israel. With no Palestinian elections on the horizon -- a vote scheduled for January was canceled -- Hamas has free rein to rule in Gaza.

Hamas swept Palestinian legislative balloting in 2006 and took over the Gaza Strip a year later when its gunmen routed forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who still governs the West Bank. Syria and Iran back Hamas, while the U.S., its Middle East allies and the European Union support Abbas’s rule.

Caftans in Court

Some of the efforts are meeting resistance. When Supreme Court Justice Abdel Raouf Al-Halabi ordered women lawyers on July 26 to wear headscarves and caftans in court, attorneys contacted satellite television stations including Al-Arabiya to protest. On Sept. 6, Hamas’s Justice Ministry rescinded the directive.

Hamas officials say they have no plans to impose Islamic law. “What you are seeing are incidents, not policy,” said Younis al-Astal, a Hamas legislator. “We want Islamic law to be the standard, but we believe in persuasion.”

In an Oct. 13 speech, Abbas said Hamas was establishing an “emirate of darkness” in Gaza. Abbas’s Fatah movement has long viewed itself as a secular nationalist movement open to Muslims and Christians.

At the immigration office at Gaza’s border with Israel, a sign warns that alcoholic beverages, forbidden under Islam, will be poured out “in front of the owner.”

The government’s Islamic Endowment Ministry has deployed Virtue Committee members to preach at public places to warn of the dangers of immodest dress, card playing and dating.

Dancing Ban

The opening of the Palestinian Heritage Museum on Oct.7 was meant to include a rendition of the dabke, a line dance performed by girls and boys. Except that no girls were allowed.

Black-shirted men from Hamas carrying AK-47s appeared at the gates of the museum, on Gaza’s waterfront, said Jamal Salem, the curator. They said girls shouldn’t dance because it wasn’t religiously proper. Nor could they share the stage for the inaugural speeches, said Salem.

“They are trying to take Palestinian culture and make it all their own,” Salem said. “They say our traditions are against the law. Their law.”

In August, headmasters of several schools ordered girls to don white head scarves and black cloaks called jilbabs. They sent several girls in jeans home, according to Gaza press reports. The Education Ministry later said the orders were unauthorized acts of individual school officials.

No Defiance

“The episodes had an effect anyway,” said Eyad Sarraj, a psychiatrist and human rights campaigner. “What parent wants to be seen to defy Islamic rules?”

Abusada, the Gaza political science professor, said Hamas only retreats from overt Islamization for fear of “provoking” such secular-ruled Arab countries as Egypt, with which it competes for support with Abbas.

“At the same time, Hamas is under pressure from some of its own members as well as even more radical groups to implant a purist version of Islam,” he said.

Hamas is also wary of openly pressing for rule by religious edict because it undermines the group’s claim to legitimacy under Palestinian civil law, which set guidelines for the 2006 legislative vote, said Subhia Juma, a lawyer at the Independent Commission for Human Rights in Gaza.

“Hamas backs off when it looks like they are governing under Islamic law and people complain,” she said.

Israel, the U.S. and the EU say Hamas is a terrorist organization.

Swimming in Pants

In June, black-clad constables approached journalist Asmaa al-Ghoul, 27, and friends on a north Gaza beach, al-Ghoul said. Her offense: swimming in trousers and a blouse, not robes.

Male companions, including her brother, tried to defend her. Al-Ghoul said she phoned the government spokesman, who called off the police.

Hamas police spokesman Rafik Abu Hani said the crackdowns were abnormalities.

“Even here, we don’t make everyone wear Islamic-style beards,” he said, pointing to a clean-shaven aide.

Everyone backs alcohol prohibition, Abu Hani said, and the motorcycle restriction is a safety issue.

Al-Astal, the Hamas legislator, said it wasn’t a coincidence that youth were the principal targets of the push.

“We are working on young people, the next generation, to be more correctly Islamic,” he said. The older generation “is lost.”

And as for motorcycles: “A girl has to hold onto a boy’s waist to ride in the back. Things can happen. You know what I mean,” he said.

On the streets of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, clusters of men wear long tunics over baggy trousers, a costume common in Pakistan but virtually unknown among Palestinians — until recently.

It is an emblem of Salafism, a branch of Islam that advocates restoring a Muslim empire across the Middle East and into Spain. Some Salafis preach violence, even killing Muslims deemed not pious enough. While historically a fringe group in the southeastern Mediterranean, Salafis have sought inroads in Lebanon and Jordan and are battling Hamas in Gaza.

While Al Qaeda, which shares its conservative religious views and promotion of holy war, has not gained a foothold in the region, Salafism may be the wave of the future. In Algeria and Morocco, similar movements have expanded in the past two decades to create havoc through civilian bombings and attacks on the police.

“This is the challenge we face in the world,” said Bilal Saab, a researcher in Middle East security at the University of Maryland in College Park. “We are getting better at dealing with insurgencies, though Afghanistan is proving to be an exception. It is much more difficult to combat the constant threat of underground urban terrorism.”

Armed Salafis are challenging the authority of Hamas, the Islamic party that rules the Gaza Strip and has fought Israel for two decades. Gaza Salafis say Hamas surrendered its credentials as an Islamic resistance group when it declared a unilateral cease-fire after a 22-day war with Israel that ended Jan. 18. Hamas’s Health Ministry said 1,450 Palestinians were killed in the conflict. The Israeli Army put the toll at 1,166 Palestinians and 13 Israelis.

“They believe Hamas has been neutralized and has given up the fight,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a professor at Al-Azhar University in Gaza.

Hamas, which is on the U.S. State Department list of terrorist organizations, is holding dozens of Salafis in jail, trying to persuade them to end their opposition, said a Hamas police spokesman, Rafik Abu Hani. “They want to implement their own ideas through weapons, and we can’t allow that.”

Arrests began after an Aug. 14 Hamas raid on a mosque in Rafah, where armed Salafis belonging to a group called Warriors of God had gathered. The group’s leader, Abdel-Latif Musa, had proclaimed an Islamic emirate in Gaza, directly challenging Hamas rule, according to a transcript published by the Middle East Media Research Institute, a Washington-based translation and analysis organization. Mr. Musa and 21 other people, including six civilians, died in the raid.

“The emirate idea was crossing a line of Hamas tolerance,” Mr. Abusada said. “Hamas basically said, ‘Don’t mess with us.”’ Since the crackdown, Salafis have been responsible for two bombings that did not cause any casualties, he added.

The Warriors of God group is among at least four armed Salafi organizations in Gaza, along with the Army of Islam, Victory of Islam and Lions Den of Supporters, Mr. Abu Hani said. Members total no more than 400 to 500, he estimated. Mr. Abusada said there were many more: between 4,000 and 5,000, including defectors from Hamas.

The next step would be for these groups to unify and organize, attract more newcomers dissatisfied with Hamas and try to forge ties with Al Qaeda, said Samir Ghattas, a Palestinian analyst at the Maqdis Center for Political Studies in Gaza, at a Sept. 30 terrorism conference.

In 2007, a Salafi group in Lebanon called Fatah al Islam held off the country’s army for three and a half months at the Nahr al Bared Palestinian refugee camp. The combat left about 400 militants and 168 soldiers dead, according to Lebanese press reports.

Remnants of the Salafi group probably have taken refuge in other Palestinian camps in Lebanon, Mr. Saab wrote in the September issue of CTC Sentinel, a publication of the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. Also, security forces have foiled Salafi attacks in Jordan, he wrote.

The Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat has spearheaded several years of civil war in Algeria. After pledging allegiance to Osama bin Laden in 2006, the group changed its name to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. It has bedeviled Algeria with bombings and ambushed security forces, even though membership is only in the hundreds, according to U.S. State Department statistics.

While there is no indication of any direct relationship between militant Salafis and Al Qaeda, they have become a reference point for radical groups from Morocco to Central Asia. One Salafi in the Gaza Strip town of Khan Younis, who called himself Abu Iyad, said he did not belong to any armed organizations but understood people who did.

Hamas adherents “say they resist Israel, but they stopped fighting,” he said. “Why did all the people die? Hamas is acting just like Fatah,” the movement led by President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, who favors peace talks with Israel.

“What the Salafis don’t understand is we need to give the people a break; we need to rebuild and prepare for the next battle,” said Younis Astal, a Hamas member of the disbanded Palestinian Parliament. “We can’t have perpetual war. That would be inhuman. Anyway, they want to make Gaza like an Al Qaeda base, and we don’t want that.”

Hosting the German foreign minister this week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used an especially tainted term to condemn the Palestinian demand that Israel's settlements in the occupied West Bank be removed.

"Judea and Samaria cannot be Judenrein," a Netanyahu confidant quoted him as telling Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

Asked how Germany's top diplomat responded to hearing the Nazi Holocaust term for areas "cleansed of Jews," the confidant said, "What could he do? He basically just nodded."

Protocol might have indicated that a representative of the country that carried out the World War Two genocide, and which has since made much effort to atone, be spared such invocations.

But these are not normal times for the right-wing Netanyahu coalition. It faces unprecedented U.S. pressure to make way for a Palestinian state on West Bank land that many Jews call Judea and Samaria and consider their eternal, biblical birthright.

Hence the jaw-dropper defiance of "Judenrein," which the confidant said Netanyahu had encouraged cabinet colleagues to deploy in their defense of the settlements and of Israel's insistence that Palestinians recognize it as a Jewish state.

Briefing foreign reporters last week, Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, a stalwart of Netanyahu's Likud party, urged them to ask whether "Palestinians would accept that Jews will live among them, or whether it is going to be totally not allowed."

"'Judenrein' is the term that was once used in other countries," Meridor said darkly, in remarks echoed the next day by another Likud minister who briefed journalists and diplomats.

Some diplomats have quietly questioned the propriety of applying such comparisons to a Middle East conflict which is a unique mix of race and religion, conquest and coexistence.

German officials made no comment on the terminology.

RUSE?

The Palestinians, for their part, see a rhetorical ruse by an Israeli leadership which has shown little appetite for entering negotiations on a two-state peace accord.

"We believe that this is simply a new strategy by Israel to delay any real outcome," said Xavier Abu Eid, a Palestinian diplomat. "In past negotiations, I can assure you, Israel never tried to have Jews remain in the state of Palestine."

Challenged over the West Bank settlers' prospective status, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad was quoted this week telling the Ideas Festival in Aspen that "Jews, to the extent they choose to stay and live in the state of Palestine, will enjoy those rights and certainly will not enjoy any less rights than Israeli Arabs enjoy now in the state of Israel."

Abu Eid said Palestinian jurists had yet to examine how settlers could become citizens. Nor is it clear how Fayyad's Palestinian Authority can claim to set long-term policy given its feud with the hardline Hamas Islamists who control Gaza.

Zalman Shoval, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington and veteran Likud member, voiced misgivings about the use of "Judenrein" in the Palestine context: "I don't like to transfer the trappings of Nazis to others, even if they are our enemies."

What was being branded as the Palestinians' bigotry, he said, could also be prudence about steps that might pre-judge disputes such as those over Palestinian refugees from Israel.

An Israeli diplomat suggested that Netanyahu, in adopting harsh language such as "Judenrein," aimed to mollify hawks in his coalition government over his agreement in principle to see the eventual establishment of a demilitarized Palestinian state.

"Netanyahu has done what was long considered unthinkable for a Likud leader," the diplomat said.

"So now he has to talk tough."

Abu Fadi, a police officer loyal to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, stood up among the roses and lemons in a Gaza garden and pulled down his trousers.

Scars on each knee and ankle and one at his right hip attested to a vicious punishment. He said the wounds were caused by gunmen from Hamas, the Islamic party that rules the sandy coastal enclave and fiercely opposes the Abbas government, which governs the West Bank. The masked men came to his house, told him he was a spy for Israel, shot him nine times from less than a meter away and left him in a pool of blood on his driveway.

“I will have to take revenge,” said Abu Fadi, who asked that his last name not be used. “I can never forgive and forget.” He now walks with crutches because his right leg is paralyzed.

Abu Fadi’s saga reflects the bitter power struggle between Hamas and Mr. Abbas’s Fatah party. The violent conflict is crippling efforts to reconcile the two groups, clouding prospects for possible peace talks with Israel.

At the heart of the dispute is Palestinian discord over future relations with the Jewish state. Unlike Mr. Abbas and Fatah, Hamas refuses to recognize Israel, a requirement of a proposed two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Israel initiated a 22-day military assault on the Gaza Strip in December to deter Hamas rocket fire. About 1,300 Palestinians died and 13 Israelis were killed; thousands of homes and scores of public buildings were damaged.

The question of who speaks for Palestinians is a major stumbling block in organizing peace talks with Israel that President Barack Obama has proposed. He is scheduled to address the Muslim world on June 4 in Cairo, where Egypt has been working to bring Hamas and Fatah into a coalition government.

It isn’t clear whether reconciliation will be enough if Hamas, which the U.S. regards as a terrorist organization, refuses to recognize Israel and to commit to the outcome of the negotiations. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has yet to agree to the two-state solution.

“It is hard enough to see how peace talks will succeed anyway,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a political scientist at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. “Maybe we’re headed for a three-state solution: Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.”

Hamas-Abbas antagonism is also contributing to Gaza’s deepening impoverishment. More than $4 billion in Gaza war-reconstruction aid is blocked because international donors, including the United States and the European Union, refuse to give Hamas the money, demanding that Fatah be in charge.

On May 19, the Israeli intelligence chief, Yuval Diskin, told the country’s parliamentary Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that there could be no peace while Hamas rules Gaza, Israel Army Radio reported. He predicted that the power struggle would continue, with Hamas refusing to relinquish Gaza and Mr. Abbas refusing to give up the West Bank, the radio said.

The internal Palestinian conflict erupted when Hamas swept parliamentary elections in 2006 and reached its height in June 2007, when the Islamic group routed Mr. Abbas’s security forces from Gaza. During Israel’s 22-day offensive last winter, Hamas executed 18 Fatah sympathizers, according to an April 20 report from Human Rights Watch, based in New York. Arrests, torture and killings continued even after the fighting stopped, the report said.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights, an independent organization, has criticized both sides. In a March 20 report, it took Mr. Abbas’s government to task because “detainees, including children, are subject to torture during interrogation and/or detention.”

“We’re living in an ocean full of grime,” Eyad Sarraj, a physician and human rights activist based in Gaza, said in an interview. “Simply put, this is all criminal activity.”

He estimates that 40 Fatah activists are in Gaza jails and that 400 Hamas supporters are in Fatah detention in the West Bank.

“There is no national mission anymore for the Palestinians, only fighting for power,” said Abu Fadi, 36, who spoke in an isolated compound belonging to his brother on Gaza’s outskirts to avoid being observed talking to a reporter.

He said the Hamas police began to pursue him last year after a bomb exploded near a Gaza beach and killed several Hamas members. The police blamed Fatah and rounded up hundreds of former members of Mr. Abbas’s police force.

Abu Fadi said he wasn’t charged with any wrongdoing; still, Hamas interrogators called him in for questioning during the next few months. He said they suspected he was feeding information on Hamas officials’ movements to Ramallah, Mr. Abbas’s West Bank headquarters. He was beaten, and then on Jan. 20, shot as he sat in front of his home in the Jabalya refugee camp.

Hamas and Fatah officials seek to justify their crackdowns as matters of internal security.

“We have broken up many nests of spies,” said Islam Shahwan, a Hamas police spokesman in Gaza. “They send information to Ramallah, which then passes it to Israel.”

Nonetheless, he said, arrests have been minimal and reports of abuse exaggerated. “What goes on here is nothing compared to the West Bank. There, our people are arrested every day.”

Mr. Shahwan said that during the 22-day war, Fatah militants, including prisoners who escaped from a bombed jail, were shot down by Hamas fighters.

“It was wartime; Israel destroyed our police infrastructure. We could not keep order. We can’t be blamed.”

In Ramallah, Lt. Col. Bilal Abu Hamed, a spokesman for Mr. Abbas’s police force, said that Hamas detainees were put in custody either for arms smuggling or for trying to incite the public against Mr. Abbas and Fatah and that they weren’t tortured.

“It’s nothing like what’s happening in Gaza,” he said. Members of Hamas “think they will go to heaven if they kill someone from Fatah.”

Abu Fadi sees no reconciliation on the horizon.

“Israel takes our land, but Hamas is taking our soul,” he said. “We can’t bargain away our soul.”

Daniel Williams is a columnist with Bloomberg News.