Real Lives
Gaza's fishermen keep going back to a sea they cannot enter
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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Before the war, a man in Gaza could say what he did for a living in one word, and the word carried a boat, a crew, a stretch of coast he knew by the colour of the water.
Four thousand two hundred people were registered fishers and boat owners, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization counted, and six thousand relied on fishing as their main income. Around them the trade held up a further hundred and ten thousand — the ice sellers, the net menders, the women running the stalls, the carpenters who repaired hulls, the drivers who moved the catch inland before dawn.
That is a whole society organised around a horizon.
What the sea became#
The FAO recorded what happened to it. Between October 2023 and April 2024 the daily catch fell to 7.3 per cent of what it had been in 2022, a production loss the agency put at 17.5 million dollars.
The port at Gaza City was severely damaged and most of the fishing boats north of Wadi Gaza were destroyed. Both of the Strip's main aquaculture farms went, and the hatchery with them.
A trade can survive a bad season. It does not easily survive the loss of the boats, the port, the cold chain and the hatchery in the same year.
The line no one can see#
What the fishermen describe now is not a narrowed zone but a closed one. The head of the Gaza fishermen's union has said the permitted area has been reduced to zero, with a naval closure in force from the first day of the war and still in force after the ceasefire.
When the truce came in January 2025 men went out anyway, on borrowed boats, because the alternative was a queue for flour. They were pursued, fired on, and in some cases arrested and had the borrowed boat confiscated — inside one nautical mile, within sight of the people on the shore.
Three fishermen were shot and wounded this week, the Palestinian outlet Felesteen reported, among the violations it recorded of a ceasefire that is supposed to be holding.
Why they go anyway#
The reasonable question is why a man puts to sea when the rule is that he may not, and the answer is not bravado.
Fishing is the only food production in Gaza that does not need land, and land is what the war took. A boat that gets an hour out and back brings protein into a household that has been eating tinned aid, and it brings it without a distribution card, a queue or anyone's permission.
That is the arithmetic. A morning's risk against a family's week.
The fishermen of Gaza are not waiting to be given the sea back as a favour. They are waiting for a rule they can plan around — a distance, published and honoured, that a man can teach his son.
Until then they go out at first light, stay inside a line they cannot see, and come back with whatever the shallow water will give.
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