TAMMUN: Under the watery winter sun, a handful of Palestinian workers are plucking strawberries from row-upon-row of plants inside a sprawling greenhouse in the northern

Once upon a time, these men raised crops and flowers in hothouses in Jewish settlements scattered throughout the Palestinian territories.

Now, they are working for their own people on a new venture which is being seen as a test case ahead of an official Palestinian ban on working in settlements a well-paid form of work which currently employs more than 30,000 Palestinians.

"This is the first project of its type in Palestine," boasts project owner Abu Dargham, whose farm grows flowers and strawberries and it is situated on several hectares (acres) of land in Tammun village in the northern Jordan Valley.

"We have to offer an alternative to the workers," he says, clicking prayer beads between his fingers. "This is an economic, national, social and political project."

Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has made no secret of his desire to disentangle the Palestinian economy from the Israeli settlements and in 2010 pushed through a successful boycott on trading in settlement goods.

He has called on people to stop working on the settlements, but so far the Palestinian Authority has not tried to pass legislation banning it mainly because there is no alternative employment to offer.

Any ban on working in settlements would have serious repercussions for the West Bank's economy, where unemployment stands around 15.2 percent.

"The prime minister told us to stop buying from the settlements and to stop working on them," says Abu Dargham, who received $10,000 from the Dutch government to get his project off the ground last August.

He employed up to 30 workers for the launching of the project but doesn't get any funding from the Palestinian Authority.

For Bashar al-Masri, life is much easier working for Abu Dargham.

For one thing, he no longer has to get up in the middle of the night to go through the security checks at the checkpoints located outside every settlement.

"The working conditions are much better here," says Masri, 30, who for years worked in the neighbouring settlement of Roi for a daily salary of some 70 shekels ($19, 14 euros) the same as he earns working for Abu Dargham.

"I used to have to leave at 3:00 am to be at the checkpoint at 5:00 am and start work at between 6:30 or 7:00," the father of two told AFP. "Over there, the soldiers on duty could open fire or make us wait several hours for no particular reason."

After 25 years of growing plants and flowers on one of the nearby settlements, Mahmud Mansur Beni Awdeh, 45, suddenly found himself out of a job after a dispute with his bosses.

"We were all laid off without any severance pay," he told.

"All my former colleagues wanted to come here but there wasn't space for everyone," he says. He thinks he was selected due to his years of experience.

"There are at least 30,000 Palestinian workers in the settlements, and we can't find work for all of them straight away but the Palestinian Authority must start setting up more projects like this," he says.

According to the Ramallah-based Ministry of Labour, around 32,000 Palestinians work in the settlements, around a third of whom are employed without a proper work permit.

Although the ministry says it has encouraged workers to register their interest in finding alternative sources of employment, so far, it has received very few responses.

In another greenhouse full of strawberry plants, 20-year-old Imran Bishara, who was taken on in October, is happy to be done with the job insecurity of working in the settlements of Mekhora or Bekaot.

Although Abu Dargham is pleased he has improved life for his workers, he happily admits that there is also an economic incentive for doing so.

"I recruited them not only to give them an alternative to working in the settlements," he says, "but also because they have a level of skill which doesn't exist in Palestinian agriculture."