When looking for livelihood becomes a path to death, captivity, and kidnapping, or an increase in torment and suffering… you would be looking at Palestinian fishermen in the besieged Gaza Strip, who insist on working to achieve a decent living for their families despite all the complexity and hardship surrounding their profession as a result of the siege imposed by the occupation on the Gaza Strip and its residents.
Perhaps what is most well-known about the fishing sector in the besieged Gaza Strip is that the occupation forces impose a security cordon and suffocating punitive measures that determine the nautical miles within which fishermen are “allowed” to practice their profession. These nautical miles are – at best – twelve miles from Gaza’s shore. While everybody sees this as acceptable, it provides a temporary availability of fish in the local market.
The truth is that the occupation intermittently reduces these already few miles to reach six nautical miles in some periods, a surface that can – in the normal human condition outside Palestine – be passed by a simple boat for an ordinary person who does not intend to nor practice fishing.
Dozens of hasakat boats, as the Palestinians from Gaza call them, are docked at the Gaza port, or what the fishermen call the boat cemetery. Some of those boats have been there for many years, as their owners fail to perform the necessary maintenance due to the occupation’s measures prohibiting necessary materials from reaching the Gaza Strip through the crossings designated for the entry of commercial and industrial goods.
According to the data of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, as well as the data of the Fishermen’s Syndicate in the Gaza Strip, more than 300 boats are completely out of service, and a large number of fishermen’s boats suffer from technical malfunctions of varying damage, operating partially in a condition that constitutes a safety hazard for the fishermen.
Published data indicates that there are about 2,500 fishing boats in all of the Gaza Strip, making for the livelihood of more than 10,000 fishermen, 4,000 of which are registered with the Fishermen’s Syndicate.
However, all these boats urgently need technical maintenance, even those that appear to be in good condition suffer from defects that may lead to serious problems while sailing. It is worth noting here that – according to experts – there is not a single fishing boat, in the entire Gaza Strip, that can be described as new.