Water Fact: October 3, 2022
Israel’s repeated naval attacks on Gaza’s fishermen go unchecked and largely unnoticed
Imagine trying to feed your family by fishing from a small open boat, only to be attacked with live ammunition, high velocity gas bombs, water cannon spraying wastewater mixed with chemicals, and flares fired from swift Israeli naval vessels. This shockingly common story rarely makes the Western media.
Just in the single month of September 2022 Palestinian fishing boats along the Gazan coast were attacked on September 4, 10, 12, 13, 16, 17, 24, and 28. The attacks resumed on October 1. A September 14th press release issued by the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights described the assault on 2 fishing boats sailing within 7 nautical miles of Gaza’s coastline near Deir al-Balah. Four fishermen were arrested and their boats confiscated. According to the press release, since the beginning of 2022 Israeli forces have staged 340 attacks on Palestinian fishermen, injuring 16 people, including 3 children. Forty-nine fishermen had been arrested, 7 children among them and 18 fishing boats had been confiscated.
As poverty and hunger pervade the Gaza Strip 15 years after Israel imposed its closure, the number of registered fishermen has declined from 10,000 in the year 2000 to no more than 4,000 today. It is not just the daunting physical dangers they face that has caused this decline. Having been granted a 20-nautical-mile fishing zone under the 1995 Oslo Accords, Palestinian fishermen are now barred from entering 85% of that area, and often forced to fish no more than 3 nautical miles from shore, where water can be polluted and fish are scarce.
Israel began to restrict the area that it had agreed should be open to Palestinian fishermen after the 1999 discovery of gas reserves some 22 miles from Gaza’s coast, which it is determined to keep for itself. See Fact #203.
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