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Press Release
We Call on International Agencies to Support the Fishermen of Gaza
by Free Gaza Group, 18 July 2007
Issues
• The basic human right of being allowed to feed oneself
• The environmental threats imposed by illegal military actions
In Gaza, fishing is a potentially lethal experience. The Israeli Military ignores the Oslo Agreement that gives the Palestinians of Gaza the right to fish, and international law that designates a 20 naval-mile (NM) zone to the Palestinians. Therefore, the fishermen are constrained to a 6 nm zone for fishing preventing them from earning a living and feeding their families. Even within the 6 nm zone, the Israeli army is firing upon the fishermen.
Also, this illegal restriction of the current fishing zone gives access only to a shallow coastal zone. Hence, a spawning and nursing zone that normally would be protected from most fishing activities and serve to populate the surrounding waters has become overexploited.
Over almost thirty years, the fishing area available to Palestinian fishermen has been systematically reduced from a gigantic 75,000 sq km (before 1978, it included waters off the Sinai coastline), to 1,100 sq km (after 1978) to a mere 300 sq km today.
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