Anyone who goes near the water risks his life. But if we leave the sea, we die’

March 11, 2025
Ruwaida Kamal Amer
Little remains of Gaza’s fishing industry, devastated by the war and years of Israeli restrictions. Yet fishermen are still clinging on to their livelihood.

For 17 months, Ahmed Al-Hissi, a 54-year-old fisherman from Gaza’s Al-Shati refugee camp, hasn’t touched his fishing rod. It remains in the storage room by the port where he stashed it shortly after Israel launched its onslaught on the Strip, and he hasn’t dared retrieve it — even after the ceasefire took hold.
“We have large families, and fishing is our only source of income,” he explained to +972 Magazine. “We are still waiting for the [Israeli] army to allow us to fish.”
For years, Gaza’s fishermen have had to contend with ever-shrinking fishing zones imposed as part of Israel’s blockade of the territory. But after October 7, the industry ground to a complete halt, with Israeli naval ships regularly opening fire at anyone who entered the sea. “My sons tried to fish from the beach, and they were still shot at,” Al-Hissi recounted.
After the ceasefire went into effect in January, Al-Hissi, who has been fishing since his teens, went back to the port with his sons in the hope of returning to work. They found a scene of utter devastation: all the boats in the harbor had been destroyed. “There was nothing,” he said. “We need to start from scratch.”
Indeed, precious little remains of Gaza’s once-thriving fishing industry after a year and a half of Israeli bombardment. Nizar Ayyash, the head of Gaza’s fishermen union, estimates the damage to the industry to be worth around $75 million. According to the Agriculture Ministry, Israel has killed at least 200 fishermen, and it continues to threaten, target, and kill them even after the ceasefire.
Al-Hissi knows these dangers better than anyone: two of his sons were shot dead by Israeli forces while out at sea, in 2017 and 2021 respectively. “Under the Israeli occupation, this profession was never safe for us,” he explained. “Even before the war.”
Rajab Abu Ghanem, 51, owned a large fishing boat which he took out to sea every day for decades. He used to be able to see the water from his home in the upscale coastal neighborhood of Sheikh Ijlin, south of Gaza City. “I have lived there since my childhood,” he told +972. “Day and night I breathed the sea air, and I would walk 10 steps and be on the beach.”
At the beginning of the war, Abu Ghanem and his family were displaced to the tent encampment of Al-Mawasi, near Khan Younis in the south of the Strip. There, he would occasionally walk along the coast and see fishermen on very small boats trying to catch what they could with nets and rods. “The Israeli army continued to target them, and the area where they cast their nets had meager fish,” he recounted.
Upon his return to northern Gaza following the ceasefire, Abu Ghanem found his house badly damaged and his boat destroyed. Fearing being targeted by Israeli gunships, he is still choosing to stay away from the water.
“I used to work on my boat with my children,” he lamented. “I can’t believe that I haven’t entered the sea to fish for a year and a half. I cry every day when I look at the sea and cannot enter it.”  
From blockade to war
Gaza’s fishing industry has been in decline since 1993, when the Oslo Accords restricted the permitted fishing zones off the enclave’s coast. While the agreement stipulated the limit at 20 nautical miles from the shore, Israel never allowed Palestinian fishermen to venture beyond 15, and periodically imposed much heavier restrictions. These constraints naturally limited the types of fish they could catch, leading to an overreliance on smaller fish and disrupting the balance of marine life.
Israel’s blockade of the territory since 2007 and the activities of American and Israeli gas companies operating close to Gaza’s shores have further crippled the industry. Israeli naval ships have regularly attacked Palestinian fishermen, as well as unlawfully detaining them and confiscating their boats.
Despite these challenges, the number of registered fishermen working across Gaza rose to 4,900 in the months prior to the war, with an additional 1,500 Palestinians employed in related labor such as fish cleaning, in ice factories, or as fish merchants. But according to Ayyash of the fishermen union, this growth was driven primarily by a lack of other work opportunities in the Strip.
Now that’s all gone. Israel’s bombardment destroyed the majority of Gaza’s fishing boats and prevented most fishermen from getting anywhere close to the sea.
Some, however, like 35-year-old Subhi Nayef Abu Rayala, couldn’t stay away despite the risks. Displaced from Al-Shati in the north to Rafah and then Deir Al-Balah in the south — without any of his equipment or his boat — he joined up with local fishermen who were defying their own fears and going out to catch what they could in the shallow waters. “I was afraid, but I am a fisherman and I couldn’t survive without the sea,” he told +972.
Before the war, Abu Rayala would take his boat out at night, when conditions were best. But doing so after October 7 became a death sentence. “We went out during the day so the Israeli ships would see that we were just fishing near the shore,” he explained.
Every morning, Abu Rayala would scan the shoreline for Israeli gunships. “If they were there, I wouldn’t enter the sea; if they weren’t, I went fishing,” he said. “When we came back from a catch, we would find people waiting for us on the beach wanting to buy fish because of the lack of any alternative protein-rich food in Gaza for months.” But most of the more nutritious fish, he noted, swim at greater depths than they were able to safely access.
Since returning north after the ceasefire, however, Abu Rayala has not gone back out to sea. “I thought it would make things easier, but it turned out to be the opposite,” he told +972. “Anyone going near [the water] is risking his life.”
“If we leave the sea, we die”
Ismail Abu Jiab, 35, has worked as a fisherman in Gaza for the past 16 years. He used to own a large boat and employed four workers, but his business was devastated by Israel’s bombardment. “At the beginning of the war, all the large boats were targeted and burned,” he told +972.
To try to eke out a living, Abu Jiab and his friend kept working with whatever equipment they could salvage, earning themselves less than NIS 10 ($2.75) a day. “We went back to using all the old equipment: the paddle boat from 20 years ago, and nets that are torn and worn out.” he said. “We would work for one day and then pause for 10 because the equipment couldn’t handle more than that.”
Even when fishing close to shore, Abu Jiab and his fellow fishermen faced constant harassment from Israeli naval forces. Gunboats would hover nearby, shooting at fishermen or damaging their boats. Moreover, Israel’s closure of border crossings blocked the entry of gasoline and fiberglass, making it impossible to repair or maintain fishing boats.
“I have eight children who need food,” Abu Jiab lamented. “No one cares about us, no local or international institutions.”
In December 2024, as winter set in and seawater began to flood the tents of displaced Palestinians sheltering on the beach in Deir Al-Balah, Abu Jiab and his fellow fishermen emptied out their damaged storage rooms in the port to provide refuge. “The ones that weren’t totally destroyed were burned, but they were still better than tents,” he said.
Abu Jiab continued working as much as he could throughout the war, but has stopped since the ceasefire in response to Israeli threats. “My whole life is at sea,” he said. “We inherited this profession from our fathers and grandfathers. We are like fish: if we leave the sea, we die.”
In response to +972’s inquiry, an Israeli army spokesperson stated that Gaza’s population has been “informed of restrictions on the maritime area adjacent to the Gaza Strip,” adding that the Israeli navy’s “mission is to ensure the security of the State of Israel against security threats in the maritime arena while taking feasible precautions to mitigate civilian casualties.”

When speaking up for Palestine becomes a crime

Ahmad Ibsais
The fight to free Mahmoud Khalil is not merely about preserving First Amendment rights, it is about whether we will allow our government to criminalize resistance to its complicity in human rights abuses and genocide.
As a Palestinian, I learned very young that our very existence was a form of protest. Every family gathering that turned into a political discussion and every celebration existed in defiance of forces that would rather see us disappear. This is why the detention of Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil strikes at the core of my being—I recognize in his abduction the same suffocating tactics used to silence Palestinians for generations, now deployed on American soil against those who dare speak our name.
Khalil’s detention by ICE agents on March 8, marks a watershed moment in American democracy. As his pregnant wife watched helplessly, government agents took away a legal permanent resident whose only “crime” was serving as a negotiator in campus protests calling for university divestment from companies profiting from Israel’s Genocide on Gaza.
Let us be clear: Mahmoud Khalil is a political prisoner—detained not for any recognizable crime, but for criticizing Israel. There is no law against calling for the end of genocide, nor should there be in a constitutional democracy. Yet the Trump administration has effectively created such a crime, linking legitimate criticism of a colonial state to “antisemitism,” by abducting and detaining a green card holder solely for his political expression.
After Khalil’s detention, the official White House Instagram account published an image of him with the words “Shalom Mahmoud” plastered across it—a chilling taunt that reveals the administration’s contempt for due process and basic human dignity. His temporary disappearance into the ICE detention system—his lawyers couldn’t locate him for over 24 hours—mirrors the tactics of authoritarian regimes worldwide.
What makes this moment particularly dangerous is that it didn’t begin with Trump. It was precisely the Biden-Harris administration’s demonization of student protesters as antisemitic that laid the groundwork for Trump’s assault on Columbia and other universities. In January 2025, a far-right pro-Israel group submitted a list of students with visas to the Trump administration, urging their deportation for pro-Palestine advocacy. Within days, the administration issued an executive order threatening visa revocation for protesters. Secretary of State Marco Rubio made the agenda explicit, writing: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”
Across American universities, suppression has manifested in student expulsions, organizations being disbanded, and unprecedented surveillance: nine universities have forcibly shut down their Students for Justice in Palestine chapters; Columbia University expelled three students; and UCLA reportedly spent $12 million to surveil and challenge student protesters. This institutional violence mirrors the academic purges of the McCarthy era, when professors were blacklisted for ideological nonconformity.
There are countless reasons why the crusade against the Palestine movement is both morally reprehensible and democratically dangerous. At its core, Palestine stands as a righteous cause because it represents a people’s fundamental struggle for self-determination, equality, and freedom from occupation. The systematic suppression of those who advocate for these rights tramples not just abstract principles, but fundamental liberties of humanity. But Khalil’s detention shows another key reason: that the suppression of the Palestine movement is a perfect illustration of emerging fascist politics being woven into the U.S. social fabric.
For the past year-and-a-half, universities, politicians of all stripes and at every level of government, key parts of the media, corporate America, and a whole host of other institutions have happily moved heaven and earth to annihilate the Palestine movement, to conflate its activists as terrorists or terrorist sympathizers, and generally to use every authoritarian trick in the book to ensure that, once it’s destroyed, it won’t come back. This is not only wrong on its face; like all partnerships with fascism, it also opens the door to a broader crackdown on civil society and civil rights.
This effort won’t stop with Palestine activists. The government and elite institutions are trying to create a new legal and political reality in which they can just sweep away anyone who challenges their ideology or their mission. When executive agencies have the power to revoke legal status, deport, and temporarily disappear people like Khalil, it sets a dangerous precedent that signals anyone holding contrary political opinions could be next. Organizations like the ADL, which issued a statement backing Khalil’s detention, and Columbia University, which helped create the ludicrous pretext for his detention while appearing unbothered by the consequences, will have to answer for what comes next. This is not hyperbole—it is fascism being normalized under the guise of preserving “law and order” to shield a foreign country from legitimate criticism.
The mechanisms deployed against Palestine solidarity will inevitably expand to other movements challenging established power. We already see evidence in the Heritage Foundation’s “Project Esther,” which targets organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, American Muslims for Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace under the guise of combating a “Hamas Support Network.” In November, the House of Representatives approved HR 9495, which would give it authority to revoke the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit it accuses of “terrorist affinities”—without due process or evidence.
Khalil joins a long lineage of political prisoners detained for advocating just causes throughout American history. From Eugene Debs imprisoned for opposing World War I, to Japanese Americans interned during World War II for their heritage alone, to Civil Rights activists like Martin Luther King Jr. who wrote his famous ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ while detained for peaceful protest. The Black Panthers, Puerto Rican independence advocates, anti-war protesters, and Indigenous water protectors at Standing Rock have all faced state repression when challenging American imperialism. These historical parallels remind us that the criminalization of Palestine solidarity work continues America’s practice of silencing those who question its moral authority or challenge its imperial reach—a tactic consistently deployed against movements seeking justice and liberation.
But history also teaches us something powerful: movements cannot be arrested into submission. With every detention, every suspension, and every attempt at silencing, authorities have only broadened support for the Palestinian cause. As those with the privilege to speak up for Palestine, we must not be intimidated by those in power who choose to monopolize violence. We must continue to demand a ceasefire, an end to occupation, and a free Palestine where children are not condemned to watch their parents die under bombs paid for by our schools and government.
The fight to free Khalil and maintain his legal status is not merely about preserving First Amendment rights, it is about whether we will allow our government to criminalize resistance to its complicity in human rights abuses and genocide. Unless confronted, this new era of political repression threatens to normalize a regime where challenging imperial power becomes grounds for detention or deportation. What begins with Palestine will not end there—and the time to resist is now before the suppression playbook becomes the new normal for all who dare question America’s role in global injustice.