When Hassan Sheikh Hijazi first opened his flower farm in 1991, it flourished. "We had a very good family business," he says. "We exported hundreds of thousands of flowers to Holland - and from there our flowers were sold across Europe. The traders knew our flowers were good quality - and Gaza was open for business."

With its mild coastal weather and well-drained soil, the Gaza Strip is an ideal location for commercial flower farming. There are more than 100 small flower farms across the Gaza Strip, employing some 7,000 farm workers between them.

"Ten years ago farmers from Gaza were exporting 80 million flowers a year to Europe," Hassan tells us. "But the last few years have been extremely difficult, and this one has been the worst yet. I exported exactly 20,000 flowers this year due to the closure. I have lost more than one million shekels (around £140,000); but so has every flower farmer in Gaza. We are all just losing money now."

Unable to export
According to the Palestinian Authority (PA), 45 million cut flowers were exported from Gaza in 2006. But since summer 2007, the closure of Gaza has been tightened and only basic humanitarian imports enter the Strip. According to the Beit Hanoun Agricultural Association, farmers in Gaza have only been permitted to export more than 5.5 million cut flowers this season - after pressure by a European government supporting the flower industry. The effects have been devastating. Some farmers have had to resort to uprooting thousands of flowers they can no longer afford to grow. In the last few weeks there have been demonstrations in Beit Hanoun and Rafah, with farmers offering bouquets women and girls - and feeding armfuls of loose flowers to cows and goats, to symbolise the wanton waste of their work.

Ahmed Fujou has worked on Hassan Hijazi's flower farm for the last 13 years, and offers to show us around. We stroll down a mud track, and less than ten minutes later find ourselves surrounded by rows of greenhouses filled with ripe carnations. "We have 50 different shades of carnations," says Ahmed, as we wander amidst swathes of red and white, yellow and pink flowers. "We should have harvested all these flowers by now; but there is no point. We can't even sell the flowers we have harvested."

He guides us inside the farm warehouse, to a large industrial refrigerator stacked with carnations and chrysanthemums of every imaginable shade. "There are more than 100,000 flowers in here" he says. "We've been hoping to export at least some of them. But Gaza is closed so we are going to have to turn the refrigerators off, and feed these flowers to the cattle. We can't even afford to pay the electricity bill."

Anger and frustration
We return to Hassan's house for coffee, where we meet his son, Mohammed. "My father is 66 years old now," says Mohammed. "He should be enjoying his retirement, instead he is going to have to close his farm. But this issue is not just about my father - this is about the destruction of Gaza."

Hassan and Mohammed are angry and frustrated that Israel's blockade is effectively killing the farming industry in Gaza. But they also hold the PA and the European Union responsible for their silence in the face of the continuing closure.

"Shame on Israel" says Mohammed. "But shame on the Palestinian Authority, too. My father represents many local flower farmers in southern Gaza, but no one from the Ministry of Agriculture has even contacted us during this crisis. And shame on the European Union, because they have done nothing either. Why are they standing back in silence and allowing this to happen to us. Tell me - what is the security risk in exporting flowers?"

This story was written by Oxfam Novib partner Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR)