Ilia Yefimovich / Getty Images

A kid holds a Palestinian flag as Palestinians erect protest tents in a camp on March 20, in the E1 area next to Ma'ale Adumim. The action took place at the same time as U.S. President Barack Obama arrived to Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv.

RAMALLAH, Israel – Away from the pomp and ceremony of Barack Obama’s appearance in the West Bank on Thursday, the reaction to the president’s visit ranged from hostility to indifference.

Mustafa al Khteeb, a school teacher with seven children, was preoccupied with supporting his family, not the president’s arrival.

“I cannot feed my children,” he said as he gestured at an empty refrigerator and suppressed tears. “I feel like half a man. This is a shame.”

Al Khteeb’s salary, small to start with at about $700-a-month, is rarely paid on time, and usually he gets only half of it. The Palestinian Authority is strapped for cash and the first people to be affected are the 153,000 civil servants, including teachers, who can barely survive the month. In January, they went on strike calling for full payment of their salaries.

“I blame President Obama,” al Khteeb said.

“Why?” a reporter asked.  “Why not blame your own government, or Israel? Why is it America’s fault?”

“Because Israel does what America tells it to do and America is on the side of Israel,” he answered.

The Palestinian Authority’s money shortfall is due to a combination of disappointing domestic revenue, falling international donations and Israel sometimes withholding the hundred million dollars it collects a month in tax on behalf of the PA.

Meanwhile, unemployment runs at around 18 percent, and average annual income for a Palestinian at about $12,000 a year, less than half of that in Israel.

Many here pin the blame for the hardship on the United States, and that spilled over as Obama’s visit approached.

Workers in the Muqata, the government compound, played cat and mouse for days with protesters who defaced posters of the American leader, waited for them to be replaced, and defaced them again.

Small demonstrations against Obama popped up daily in Ramallah with slogans like “O-Obama, go back, Palestine is not for sale,” and “Obama, you are the enemy of the people of Palestine and ally of the Jews. You are not welcome here.”

Joy and hope
This anger was in marked contrast with the joy and hope with which Palestinians greeted Obama’s first term. They believed his 2009 speech in Cairo in which he called for democracy and for the rights of Palestinians and expected a change in American policy away from what they see as America’s blind support for Israel.

Four years later, little has changed for them: Israel continues to solidify its control on much of the West Bank and few believe in any peace process. No mention of the issue was made on Wednesday when Obama arrived in Israel.

So you hear it everywhere here: Life is hard on the West Bank and it is Obama’s fault.

“There are thousands like me,” said al Khteeb, the school teacher. “Nobody can live like this.”

The small numbers that attend the demonstrations tells another part of the story. A few dozen, a hundred or so at most, marched around the main square on Thursday, holding banners, calling through megaphones, as bystanders watched and went about their business.

“What good does it do?” one said. “Nobody listens to us.”

Obama’s visit to Israel is seen as a charm offensive, to mend fences with Israelis who have felt slighted and ignored by the American leader. He faces exactly the same problem with the Palestinians.

Martin Fletcher is the author of "The List,""Breaking News" and "Walking Israel."

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On the Brink: Palestinians, Israelis lukewarm on visit

TEL AVIV, Israel -- It is surely among the strangest jail break stories ever conceived: a daring escapade in which a determined band of young women beat one of the toughest security regimes in the world.

They are the wives of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails – without the right to conjugal visits – who nevertheless claim to have become pregnant by their husbands.

This isn’t a case of the usual contraband sneaked into a jail to make life a little easier for inmates. It’s what is smuggled out that matters – the stuff of life itself.

Plenty think the plot is far-fetched, but the women insist that armed with little more than cunning and a concealed container, they can ensure that no wall or coil of barbed wire is a barrier to parenthood.

Faridah Ma’arouf laughed as she recalled hurrying out of the prison gates after visiting day was done, hiding a sample of her son’s sperm.

“We had a taxi waiting to take us very fast,’’ she said. “I thought I had to get it to the doctor quickly.’’

It seems to have been a successful operation. Three months later Ma’arouf sat in an IVF clinic where the progress of her daughter-in-law’s pregnancy was being monitored.

It is what could be described as the brainchild of Dr. Salim Abu Khaizaran, head of the Razan Center for Infertility in the Palestinian city of Ramallah on the West Bank.

“We are doing this to help these ladies because we feel as doctors that the wives of prisoners pay a very high price,” Abu Khaizaran said without revealing how many other such procedures he had conducted. “She has to wait for her husband, sometimes she can spend her lovely youth just waiting. And by the time her husband is out, many of them will not be able to have babies.”

NBC News

Faridah Ma'arouf says she smuggled a sample of her son's sperm out of Ofer Prison, above, so that her daughter-in-law could become pregnant.

He added: “The wives lose out twice because the community then pressurizes the husband to marry another woman in order to fulfill his requirements to become a father, which ... I feel is very sad.”

'What are you waiting for?'
Many of the men are serving long sentences for terrorist offenses.

Ammar Al-Zibben has been in prison for 16 years. He is serving 27 life sentences with an additional 25 years for plotting bomb attacks in Jerusalem that killed 21 people.

He is also the recent father of a baby boy, named Mohannad, who is just seven months old.

His wife, Dalal, 32, said the idea to go for IVF was originally her husband’s. The suggestion took her by surprise. She had expected opposition from family and friends in their conservative community.

“I was very surprised when I found them encouraging me enthusiastically,” she said. “Everyone said I should do it and not deny myself and my husband our basic right, to have a family.

“It reached a point where people would stop me in the street and ask me why I still hadn’t done it,” she added. “They would say to me, ‘What are you waiting for? Why are you wasting time?’”

Her husband got to see his son for the first time six months ago.

“The meeting was happy, sad, exciting. It was mixed with a lot of feelings and tears, I can’t describe to you how we both felt,’’ she said.

“I had sacrificed everything when my husband was arrested,” she said. “Now I have been given this opportunity to make my dreams come true, to have the family I always wanted. We will be waiting for my husband to come out and join us.’’

Near-miraculous conceptions
As word spread, the number of prisoners’ wives waiting for the clinic to make their dreams come true has risen, hospital officials said.

Alaa Badarneh / EPA, file

Dalal Rabaya holds her son Mohannad at a hospital in the West Bank town of Nablus on Aug. 13.

They all face the same, daunting obstacle. Typically a prisoner visitor will pass through an airport style scanner, a body search, and then be asked to leave all their possessions in a locker before they get to see their relative. And then they will be separated by glass and speak only by phone.

According to the Israel Prison Service these are near-miraculous conceptions.

“Due to technological and security restrictions that apply to prisoners in their relationship with family members, one can question the ability to smuggle as claimed,’’ Sivan Weizman, spokeswoman for the Prison Authority, said dryly.

If Abu Khaizaran has any idea how samples get from prison cell to fertility clinic, he’s not telling. But the hospital insists on the written word of two close family members that the sperm is indeed that of the husband, he said.

A black-and-white screen showed the outline of a baby in the womb. The loud and rapid beat of its heart reverberated in the fertility clinic’s small ultrasound room.

“This is the head of the baby. And there’s its hand. He’s moving. It’s a boy. Fifteen weeks,” Abu Khaizaran told mother-to-be Lidya Al-Rimawi who had come in for her first scan. “Everything looks fine.’’

Like all the women NBC interviewed, Al-Rimawi was coy when asked how she managed to evade Israeli prison guards and their searches.

“We found much difficulty. But despite the security checks we got through, thanks to God,” she said.

“Each case is different from another,’’ she said when pressed for more detail. “We smuggled it out in a bag, a small nylon bag. But it is difficult to explain how.”

“If I told you the way we smuggled it, definitely the army will prevent it from happening and there are prisoners we don’t want to deprive of this same chance.’’

She beamed as she looked at the image of the fast-growing baby inside her.

“It is a very beautiful feeling,’’ she said. “It is a feeling that cannot be described. It is a miracle.’’

Mohammed Ballas / AP

Members of the Palestinian security forces arrange Palestinian flags on coffins containing the remains of bodies of 91 militants transferred from Israel to the Palestinian Authority, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, on May 31. Israel transferred the bodies in an effort to induce Palestinian President Mehmoud Abbas to renew negotiations. Palestinian officials said all were killed either while carrying out suicide bombings or other attacks on Israeli targets.

Abbas Momani / AFP - Getty Images

Palestinian women mourn during the funeral of 91 Palestinians whose remains were returned by Israel at the Palestinian headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah on May 31. Israel handed over the remains of scores of Palestinian militants killed in attacks against Israel, a Palestinian official said.

Reuters reports -- The remains of 91 Palestinian militants whose attacks killed hundreds of Israelis over the past 35 years were returned to the West Bank and Gaza on Thursday in a gesture Israel said it hoped could help revive peace efforts. Palestinian leaders, however, signaled no shift in their refusal to negotiate as long as Israel continues building settlements on land where they hope to establish a state.

The boxed remains of 80 militants were transferred to coffins draped in the Palestinian flag for a solemn ceremony at the official compound in Ramallah of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Read the full story: Palestinians honor dead returned by Israel.

Ibraheem Abu Mustafa / Reuters

Palestinians carry a flag-covered coffin containing the remains of a Palestinian militant outside a hospital morgue in Gaza City on May 31. The remains of 91 Palestinian militants whose attacks killed hundreds of Israelis were returned to the West Bank and Gaza on Thursday in a gesture Israel said it hoped could help revive peace efforts.

Ilia Yefimovich / Getty Images

A Palestinian flag is draped over one of the coffins as Israel returns the corpses of 91 militants, in the Police camp on May 31, in Ramallah, West Bank. The militants, killed during anti-Israeli attacks, were returned despite objections raised by Almagor, a group representing Israeli victims of Palestinian attack. According to officials, some of the militants were killed over 40 years ago. Twelve of the bodies were returned to Gaza.

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