Killing The Fish of Gaza

CrossFireArabia
Features
November 1, 2025

Following the war, Gaza’s fishing sector has been left in a catastrophic state, with infrastructure largely destroyed, production severely reduced and fishermen facing an ongoing battle to resume their livelihood. Although a ceasefire now is in place, Israeli restrictions continue to hamper any recovery.

The conflict has brought Gaza’s once thriving fishing sector to collapse and the impact of the two- year escalation on the sector is devastating. Since October 7, Israel has systematically destroyed Gaza’s important source of food and livelihoods for residents of the Strip as its critical fishing sector has been almost completely obliterated.

Gaza’s average daily catch just between October 2023 and April 2024 dropped to 7.3 percent of 2022 levels, causing a $17.5 million production loss.

The main seaport in Gaza City and other landing sites has been destroyed and Gaza’s two main aquaculture farms along with the hatchery facility wiped out leaving the sector unable to produce alternative aquatic foods through aquaculture.

According to an assessment, before the conflict, over 6,000 residents in Gaza relied on the fishing industry for their primary source of income, of this total; approximately 4,500 were fishermen and boat owners.

The fishing sector supported approximately 110,000 people, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FA0), although Israel’s restrictions on the industry before the war thwarted its potential both in terms of local production to meet the needs of the population and as a source of export.

Over the years, Israel blocked access to the maritime area off the coast of the Gaza Strip, maintained a limited “fishing zone” and allowed fishermen to operate in an area only up to six nautical miles from the coast in the northern Gaza Strip and up to 15 nautical miles in certain areas, despite the Oslo Accords stipulating that should be allowed up to 20 nautical miles from the coast.

The Israeli navy enforced restrictions on the fishing zone through warning shots or live fire towards vessels and fishermen, killing or severely injuring people on multiple occasions.

In addition, Israel destroyed or confiscated boats and equipment as a matter of policy, arrested fishermen and restricted the entry of material necessary for the repair and rehabilitation of boats, such as fiberglass, engines and other items.

Over the course of the aggression, the coastal fishing infrastructure has sustained massive damage, including the main Gaza Seaport, several smaller ports, fishermen’s rooms, and vital fishing equipment.

As of late 2024 and mid – 2025, reports from NGO’s and human rights groups state that approximately 95 per cent of the fishing sector in Gaza has been destroyed.

The damage to Gaza’s fishing sector has exacerbated an already dire food security crisis as fish, once a vital source of protein and other essential nutrients for Gazans, is now nearly unavailable.

Today, in Gaza’s fishing areas lie broken boats, torn nets, and ruined infrastructure, standing in stark contrast to the once-vibrant industry that supported thousands of fishers for generations.

Fishermen have been killed, chased, and arrested, while most of their boats and equipment have been destroyed.

For Gazans, the sea was not just a source of food, but a source of livelihood and identity.

The Israeli military’s tactics in its horrific war have shown a focused effort to disrupt and destroy the civilian way of life, thereby crippling the very survival of the Gaza population.

The territory’s fishing sector stands among the hardest hit, its work force devastated and productivity nearly extinguished.

According to the Palestinian Fishermen’s Syndicate, Israel has pursued a systematic campaign to dismantle the industry that for centuries has played a significant part in the Palestinian economy, culture, and cuisine.

The fishing industry has been central to Gaza’s economy, providing employment for fishermen and others in subsidiary jobs related to packaging, marketing, and transportation as well as boat repair and maintenance.

Notably, the sector provided direct and indirect employment opportunities for youth and women, particularly through small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in both formal and informal settings.

According to the Palestinian NGO Network (PNGO), before the war, there were more than 2,000 fishing vessels in Gaza, of which 1,100 had engines and about 900 were manually operated.

The fishing industry in Gaza was one of the few autonomous food production sectors in the Strip, and therefore had a direct and critical impact on the food security of the population. According to PNGO, the sector produced an average of 3,000-4,000 tons of fish per year, alongside an additional 300-500 tons from artificial fish farms in recent years.

The decimation of the fishing industry, together with the destruction of other means of food production, has contributed to the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and ensured continued dependence of the population on entry of aid.

According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report, from May 2025, the entire population of the Gaza Strip, approximately 2.1 million people, has been facing an imminent risk of famine.

Given the restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid into the Strip since the beginning of the war, the fishing industry could have provided a source of protein to partially alleviate the crisis; instead, Israel’s destruction of the industry dramatically worsened the situation.

In addition, the Gaza fishing sector faces severe environmental challenges, including the depletion of fish stocks due to overfishing in a confined area, the destruction of fish farms, and the pollution from wastewater and damaged infrastructure.

Today, after Israel’s war halted, the situation underscores the urgent need for coordinated recovery efforts, including the restoration of fishing infrastructure, support for affected workers, and sustainable investment to rebuild the sector and protect the livelihoods it sustains.

After extensive damage, the reconstruction of Gaza’s fisheries sector requires a multi prolonged and long- term effort.

The plan involves emergency relief for fishers, restoring critical infrastructure, removing explosive ordnance, rebuilding the fish farming industry, and addressing environmental contamination.

Sufficient and sustained international funding is needed, as the estimated recovery cost of Gaza across all sectors is in the tens of billions of dollars.

A stable and sustained ceasefire is the most crucial precondition, as demonstrated by the failure of recovery efforts during renewed conflicts.

Significant international aid and a lasting peace are essential for the sector’s revival.

Najla M. Shahwan is a Palestinian author, researcher and freelance journalist and contributed the above article to the Jordan Times.

CrossFireArabia

Dr. Marwan Asmar holds a PhD from Leeds University and is a freelance writer specializing on the Middle East. He has worked as a journalist since the early 1990s in Jordan and the Gulf countries, and been widely published, including at Albawaba, Gulf News, Al Ghad, World Press Review and others.

Features

Wounders of Arabic

CrossFireArabia
February 20, 2026

EDITOR’S NOTE: I wrote this article “On Arabic” in 2008 and posted on hackwriters.com. I am reprinting it here for relvance and archival use

Compared with English, Arabic is an easy read if it is written well. When you look at English, the perception of the language, written and oral, took centuries of development from archaic structures associated with the old English of Geoffrey Chaucer, passing to Shakespeare and Christopher Marlow to George Elliot, Charles Dickens, Virginia Wolfe as well as many others and not mentioning the new contemporaries.

With Arabic it’s different. Although there may have been stages of development through out the centuries, it seems the clarity of the Arabic language was a one-time affair, represented in the Holy Koran brought down from the skies through Angel Gabriel to Prophet Mohammad in the 7th century and passed on to the Muslim community.

The Koran represented a basis for the Arabic language as it is spoken and written today. Unlike English, back in the 7th century Arabic was written in a clear, transparent, effective tone that involved action, and designed from every member of the social community, rich and poor, educated and illiterate, a source of knowledge and speech and continued to be so as it passed down through the centuries.

With English it was different. First if all, the language itself was derivative from other linguistic structures like Germanic, Latin, and French, many of which have said this is what made it stronger; Secondly English was helped by the issue of economic development as new inventions, processes and way of doing things required the development of new words, terminologies and syntax which evolved from the 17th century onwards.

Today some have been known to criticize Arabic for failing to be innovative, or developing to meet the needs of modernization and even globalization, with its inability to produce new words and terminologies to pace with the development going on in the region and the world.

However, one of the points that has to be clarified is that as these inventions came from the western countries and as communicated in English, the language proved more flexible in coming up with new words and terms, as opposed to the Arabic language that adopted a reactive approach with linguists from the region acting haphazardly in their word formations rather than following a methodical pattern.

In the process as well, we tend to get used to hearing the words and terminologies in say the English language and when we hear their equivalents in other languages such as Arabic, as there is a sense of word creation even in translations, it becomes odd and foreign simply because our ears have got used to the English pronunciation.

But this is a different view related to globalization, how much are we as Arabs integrated into the international system, how much we take from it, what do we take, what do we buy, our consumer habits and trends and indeed, how much do we produce and contribute to world society.

While this in turn becomes related to our language, its use, how much we mix words, English-Arabic, Arabic-English, the fact of the matter is that the language itself, spoken by about 300 million people in 22 Arab countries and about a 1.5 billion in Muslim countries who read the Koran in Arabic, says a great deal.

Arabic is a cogent force, its simple, attractive and gets the point across in as a logical manner as possible. It’s easy to read and to understand. It’s structure is less complex as say French and German which are grammatically more demanding than the English language.

However, just like any other language, writing in Arabic has to be learnt, it’s a professional skill; that’s why today there is an endless beating about the bush were getting the idea across is deliberately pumped and inflated and there is much hankering because of political considerations relating to ruler, government, state, security apparatuses and so on.

These considerations are over-riding and smack directly with the professionalism of writing and the way the writing of Arabic should be as passed on and continued through out the holy Koran which is sometimes used as a source of criticism by western writers and pedagogics who claim the Arabic language lacks the basis for producing new words as do the other languages.

But when Arabic is spoken and written as part of the social community there is a sense of modernist continuum as expressed in its words, expressions, figures of speech and syntax found in the structure of the language.

Nowhere is this more emphasized than it is in the Koran. Written in the 7th century, the Koran is timeless in its spiritual message, a modernist document in its approach with words, phrases and expressions that apply as much today as when it was handed down, memorized and collectively written.

Words and expression apply as much then as they apply today. The word “car” for instance is used in one of its Suras (chapters) to signify a caravan route whereas its use today implies a vehicle, and striking the reader as if you are reading a modern document about social relations, economy, authority, and kinship.

The style of language appears to be modernist as well and not with case as it is say with the Bible that is written in old English, not as old as the language used by Chaucer, but is hard to fathom just the same.

That has proved problematic for the Koran. When translated into English translators often use the kind of language that is employed by the Bible, which does not reflect the actual modernist style of the Koran for the lucidness of the holy document becomes lost and replaced by an archaic and medieval structure once found in the language, although English has moved on tremendously.

Features

Dad Digs For Family After Israel Bombs Their House

CrossFireArabia
February 15, 2026

Hammad’s house in the Sabra neighborhood was destroyed Dec. 6, 2023, during heavy Israeli bombardment. He said a powerful bomb weighing around 2,000 pounds (907 kilograms) struck the building while the family was inside.

On a mound of sand and shattered concrete that once formed the foundation of his six-story home in Gaza City, Mahmoud Hammad digs methodically through the debris, searching for the remains of his wife and children killed beneath the rubble.

Armed with little more than a small shovel and a metal sieve, the 45-year-old father filters sand by hand, hoping to find bone fragments that would allow him to lay his family to rest.

“In the absence of machinery, this is what we have,” he said, holding up the sieve.

Home reduced to dust

He lost his wife, six children, his brother, his brother’s wife and their four children.

Hammad survived but sustained severe injuries, including multiple rib fractures and injuries to his shoulder and pelvis. After months of partial recovery, he returned to the site to begin searching for his family’s remains.

“I wanted to bury them properly,” he said.

With the help of neighbors, he managed to retrieve and bury his brother and his brother’s family. But the bodies of his wife and children remain under layers of hardened debris.

“I collect what I can, piece by piece,” he said.

Missing under the rubble

Nearly 9,500 Palestinians are missing beneath destroyed buildings across the territory, according to official estimates in Gaza.

Officials said recovery efforts are severely hindered by the lack of heavy equipment needed to clear the debris. Despite a ceasefire that took effect in October, authorities said the entry of large-scale machinery remains restricted, limiting the ability of rescue teams to reach buried bodies.

Civil defense crews have repeatedly warned that the longer debris remains uncleared, the harder it becomes to recover remains.

Private grief amid mass destruction

Hammad said his wife was pregnant and close to delivery when the strike occurred, as medical services across Gaza were collapsing under the strain of the war.

“She and our unborn child died together,” he said.

Since December, Gaza has been battered by repeated storms that further displaced families living in makeshift shelters after their homes were destroyed.

For Hammad, however, the focus remains on the ruins before him.

Each day, he returns to sift through dust and fragments of concrete, driven by what he describes as a simple duty.

“They deserve to be buried with dignity,” he said.

At least 591 Palestinians have been killed and more than 1,598 injured in Israeli attacks since a ceasefire deal took effect Oct. 10, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

‏Israel’s war on Gaza, which began Oct. 8, 2023, and lasted two years, has killed more than 72,000 Palestinians and wounded over 171,000, most of them women and children, and destroyed about 90% of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure.

By Tarek Chouiref in Istanbul for Anadolu

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Killing The Fish of Gaza

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