Palestinian farmers pick dates from a palm tree in southern Gaza. (Hatem Omar, Maan Images)

Almost all of Gaza's turbulent story is bound up with Jamil Abu Hmaideh's strawberry fields here in the far north of the strip. Between two wispy clouds high in the blue sky above us, two Israeli Apache helicopters hover on the look-out for the Qassam rocket-launching crews as we bite into the luscious, perfectly ripened fruit Mr Hmaideh has picked for us. At the end of the neat plantation rows are the high sandbanks just inside the Gaza town of Beit Lahiya's border with Israel, the ones from which the military bulldozers descended when they last ploughed up one of his fields before he started planting at the end of August. Hanging on the wall in his two-room farm station is a "martyr portrait" of his 21-year-old son, Nael, who was killed in May, a non-combatant casualty of the savage infighting between Fatah and Hamas.

But what is preoccupying Mr Hmaideh as he surveys his three acres of strawberry plants in this isolated and often dangerous place is another peculiarly Gazan tragedy, a function of the absolute economic and commercial blockade to which it has been subjected by the total closure by Israel of the main cargo crossing at Karni since June, after Hamas seized control of the Strip. His entire crop of low-insecticide, high-quality fruit, scheduled for export from this very weekend across the border into Israel and beyond, much of it en route to upscale retailers in Europe, would normally fetch him the £3-£4 per kilogram he needs to break even let alone make a modest profit. This year it is destined at best to be sold at a loss he cannot possibly sustain – for 25p or less in what promises to be a saturated as well as impoverished local market.

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Much of it will rot; for the Karni closure also means he cannot import the extra plastic sheeting he needs to protect the strawberries from the rains due any day now, or the winter frosts a matter of weeks away. Mr Hmaideh, who borrowed more than £13,000 in plantation costs before the season, will simply go bust. The 8,000 families employed in Gaza's production of strawberries, cherry tomatoes and carnations, the bumper crop of which has already started to be destroyed instead of being sent to the Dutch auction houses for which it was planted, will lose their modest income. Instead, this proud farmer says with a tinge of contempt in his voice, he and they will be just left "to go to the UN and collect food coupons".

Mr Hmaideh is a leading member of the Beit Lahiya farmers' cooperative which has written to the United States, whose agency USAID ironically supplied much of its new refrigeration and washing equipment, to the UN, and to Tony Blair, who is due back in Jerusalem next week and was appointed by the international Quartet to propose ways of reviving the Palestinian economy, begging for help. Their letter warns that if the Palestinian farmers lose their place in the European market this year they will probably lose it for good to stiff competition from Spain and Egypt. And the co-operative points out that their partners are Israeli companies which are also losing out – including the big and partly state owned Agresco, which markets the strawberries and which the farmers say have also vainly pressed for a solution.

Maxime Verhagen, the Foreign Minister of the Netherlands, which lent the Gaza co-operatives – and was paid back – 4.3m last year to help incentivise the carnation and strawberry farmers, and enjoys warm relations with Israel, has written to its government to press for ways to be found to open the crossing. But so far Israel, with for what largely remains the public acquiescence of much of the international community – and, some diplomats and Gaza businessmen hint, that of Mahmoud Abbas's emergency West Bank government in Ramallah – has stood firm. All the more so since the Israeli cabinet declared Gaza a "hostile entity" last month.

To read the full article please visit The Independent.