Tag: Civil Peace Service Gaza

Fishing in Gaza – no day at the beach

24 October 2011 | Notes from Behind the Blockade

I saw an Israeli naval warship for the first time yesterday, a concrete monster the color of ash, guzzling up the Mediterranean and spurting it out in its wake.

I rose early to go out with the Oliva, a small white boat used by Civil Peace Service (CPS) Gaza to monitor the Israeli navy’s conduct vis-à-vis Palestinian fisherman.

My colleague Joe and I walked across Gaza’s sandy shore, past a dozen wooden boats painted in bright shades of pink, blue, green and yellow and then jumped onto the Oliva.  CPS’s white and blue flag billowed as Captain Salah started the boat’s engine and we pulled out of the harbor. Burgundy carpets with geometric designs lay across the boat’s floor.   Three orange life jackets sat within an arm’s reach.

“Oliva to base, we are now leaving the port,” Joe radioed.

Fishing in Gaza - Click here for more images

Because of weather conditions, we didn’t get started until about 8:20 a.m.  Joe showed me how to work the radio and we were off.  Dozens of small wooden boats – hasakas as they call them here – docked in Gaza’s peaceful harbor floated above the water, and if I didn’t know better, I may have felt like I was on a Middle Eastern pleasure cruise.

“So this may sound obvious, but if the Israelis water cannon you, don’t just stand there,” Joe informed me. “Duck,” he said in a matter of fact tone.  “Oh, and go to the front of the boat, they generally target the engine.”

We sped towards the infamous 3 nautical mile line – another unilaterally-imposed “no go” zone imposed by Israel in June 2007 – cutting through the waves. Under the Oslo Accords, specifically under the Gaza-Jericho Agreement of 1994, Palestinians are permitted to fish 20 nautical miles off the coast of Gaza.  Israel reduced this amount in 2002 to 12 nautical miles, and began enforcing a 6 nautical mile limit after Shalit’s capture in 2006.

“How are you feeling?” Joe asked me. At least one other international human rights observer had gotten sea sick on her first journey, and had asked if I would like to take something in advance of the journey for sea sickness.

“Oh I’m totally fine,” I responded.  This was nothing. I mean the Mediterranean — it wasn’t even an ocean, how bad could it be? I declined the pills. And besides, I was tough.  I sat back on the seats and chatted with Saleh for a bit in Arabic. He had 25 years of experience on the sea and told me the name of his village in what is now Israel from where his family was pushed out of in 1948.

At about 2 nautical miles I checked our position. We could see the Israeli naval ship moving towards five hasakas, headed our way. We continued forward, and then stopped our engine as one of them pulled up beside us.

“The Israelis shot live fire at us and we came back,” one of the men on the blue, yellow and white boat said.  All of the hasakas came towards us, as fast as their small engines would be allow.

We all floated around for a while, until the navy moved away and the fisherman head back out.  The Oliva straddled the 3 mile line, engines off, monitoring the situation.  The fishermen explained what I had already read, that there were no fish to catch within 3 miles from the shore. The fish were 5, 6, 7 miles out.  And so, the fishermen went out every day, sometimes fishing within 3 miles, sometimes going out further, in an attempt to ply their trade.

We watched as the Israeli navy played the game of cat and mouse with the working fisherman of Gaza, shooting at them when they came out, then moving south to shoot at another set of fisherman, then coming back towards us, and back again. Some of these fishermen had been detained by the Israeli navy in the past, taken to Ashod and then released, their boats damaged or confiscated.

“There are two more Israeli ships farther north,” Saleh explained.

I jotted down some notes, and, suddenly felt a wave a nausea. Taking notes was making me sick. I lay down.  Joe periodically radioed the base to report our coordinates.  At times, we could hear the crackle of the radio as the Israelis talked amongst themselves, sometimes in Hebrew, sometimes in English. I tried to recall the Hebrew I had learned years ago, but that too, made me sick.

“The navy is back,” Saleh reported. “Look they are very close to the fisherman.” I sat up and tried to take a few photos and some video footage, inhaling the engine’s fumes as the Oliva rocked in the sea.  I lay back down.  I was the world’s worst human rights observer at sea.

Saleh continued to explain the situation in Arabic, but my brain stopped working. I crawled up, leaned over the side of the boat and gagged a few times. And then, well, my breakfast came up.  All of it. And dinner from the night before as well.

As my head dangled over the side of the boat, I wondered if the Israeli navy was watching us with their binoculars. Didn’t they have anything better to do then harass these poor fisherman? I mean really, the navy is supposed to be one of the most prestigious units for Israelis, and here they were spending all day, every day chasing after skinny fishermen riding in tiny pastel-colored wooden boats.  Gilad Shalit was free, so really, why the 3 mile limit? Were they worried that Palestinians were going to fling sardines at them using 18h century technology?

After about ten minutes I came back up.  Captain Saleh had started the boat and he let me drive it for a few minutes, since apparently that cures sea sickness. It did. Around 11 a.m. the fishermen head back and so did we.

Back on shore, we saw the group that had initially reported the gunfire and they showed us their meager catch of silvery fish – selling for about 20 shekels ($4) a kilo. They would be back out again tomorrow, Israeli gunfire and all.

International activists in Gaza defiant despite repeated attacks

26 September 2011 | Islam Online, Hama Waqum

The Civil Peace Service (CPS) Gaza human rights observation boat has returned to the waters off the Gazan coast after being grounded for two months due to Israeli naval attacks.

CPS Gaza aims to monitor human rights violations committed off the coast of Gaza, in which Gazan fishermen are invariably the victims.  However in July, the CPS boat, Oliva, was attacked three times, with the final attack forcing the boat to retire to shore after the engine was rammed beyond repair. On September 25th, the boat made her first trip at sea, in which she was not attacked by the Israeli Navy.

Continuation of attacks

On 13 July, the Oliva crew and captain were encircled by one Israeli Navy warship, which fired water cannons continuously for fifteen minutes, aiming for the faces of the crew, as well as their cameras and radio equipments. The engine broke in the attack and the boat struggled to escape as the attack continued.

The following day, the boat was attacked by two Israeli Navy vessels, the force of the water cracking a section of the boat’s floor. The crew was forced to seek refuge on a fishing boat in order to make it back to shore. Once aboard the fishing trawler, one crew member reported that one Israeli naval officer instructed another to sink the boat with the water.

In this attack, the Navy officers also intimidated the fishermen with whom the CPS crew had sought refuge, demanding, ‘Where are your fish? Where are your fish?’ After the crew attempted to deter further attacks on the fishing boat by informing the Israeli Navy that they were international observers, a Navy officer responded by saying, ‘Leave and if we see you here again we will shoot you and the children [on board the fishing vessel] and the Europeans or Americans,’ according to one of the CPS crew members.

We won’t be intimidated

On July 20, Oliva suffered the attack that would ground her for two months, in front of a journalist from the Guardian Jerusalem office. For 20 minutes the boat was attacked with water by two Israeli Navy boats, and then rammed by one of the Israeli warships, which had a maniacal clown poster on its side.  The engine was wrecked in the attack and Oliva had, until now, been stranded ashore.

Vera Macht, a German member of the CPS Gaza project explained that the project will continue to run and document human rights violations, “We won’t be intimidated,” she explained, “Olivia will sail out again to document abuses until international law is respected by Israel in the sea of Gaza. Fishermen are harassed, attacked, arrested and even killed by Israeli armed forces, even within the imposed 3 nautical mile limit.”

On September 25, 2011, Oliva set sail again, despite warnings that the human rights observers would be shot if the project continued. The boat cut its trip short because of weather conditions; the crew experienced reduced intimidation by the Israeli Navy and were not directly attacked.

Every Israeli attack on the Oliva has occurred within the Israeli-imposed 3-mile nautical limit, which forbids vessels from travelling further out to sea. This limitation overwhelmingly affects fishermen in catching adequate fish as the three miles have been fished extensively in the four years since the limit was imposed. According to the Oslo Accords agreements, a fishing limit of 20 miles was agreed, but fishermen have been restricted to three miles since Hamas took control of the costal enclave in 2006. This prevents Gaza’s fishing communities from accessing 85% of the Oslo-agreed fishing waters.

Joe Catron, a US citizen, was aboard the CPS Gaza boat during two of the warship attacks, “The bravery of Palestinian fishermen off the Gaza coast is like nothing I’ve ever seen. These courageous men, who continue struggling to provide for themselves, their families, and their country, despite the raw military aggression they face on a daily basis, inspired all of us. I’m honored to have played a small, fleeting role in supporting their fight.”

Gaza fishermen swamped by Israeli gunboats and water cannon

24 July 2011 | The Guardian, Harriet Sherwood

Hani al-Asi, a fisherman since the age of 11 and a father with 12 mouths to feed, had just begun throwing his lines into the Mediterranean when an Israeli gunboat sped towards his traditional hasaka.

With a machine gun mounted at the rear and half a dozen armed soldiers on the bridge, the navy vessel repeatedly circled the small fishing boat. The rolling waves caused by the backwash threatened to swamp it.

Asi had stopped his boat over an artificial reef created by dumped cars to attract the dwindling fish population. He was just beyond the limit of three nautical miles from the Gaza shoreline set by the Israeli military for Palestinian fishermen, beyond which they are forbidden to fish for “security reasons”.

“We see them every day,” he said, shrugging at the gunboat’s presence. “I got used to this. Every day they are around us – shooting, damaging the boat, sometimes people are injured. If we were scared, we wouldn’t fish. But we have nothing else to do.”

With the boat rocking forcefully, the gunboat’s crew addressed Asi in Arabic through its loudspeaker. “You are in a forbidden area. Go back.” Asi pulled in the lines and headed back to port.

“The best place to fish is more than 10 miles out,” he said. “But every time we exceed three miles, they shoot at us, use the water [cannon], take the nets. Even today when foreigners are with us, they were trying to tip the boat over.”

Under the 1993 Oslo accords, Palestinian fishermen were permitted to fish up to 20 nautical miles off the coast of Gaza. Over the past 18 years, the fishing area has been successively eroded, most recently in 2007 when Israel imposed a limit of three nautical miles as part of its land and sea blockade of Gaza after Hamas took control of the territory.

But fishermen and human rights groups say that, since the war in Gaza in 2008-09, the Israeli military regularly enforces a limit even closer to the shore.

The restriction has devastated Gaza’s fishing industry. “It is a catastrophic situation,” said Khalil Shaheen of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. “Sixty thousand people are dependent on [the fishing industry], and 85% of daily income has been lost.”

Fishermen on both sides of the three-mile limit, he said, were subjected to harassment, live fire, confiscation of boats and nets, and water cannon, sometimes impregnated with foul-smelling chemicals.

Since early June, a coalition of Palestinian and international organisations under the umbrella of Civil Peace Service Gaza has been monitoring encounters between fishermen and the Israeli military from its own boat, the Oliva.

But in the past fortnight, the Oliva itself has become a target for the Israeli navy, with repeated assaults on it by military vessels. Last Wednesday, the Guardian hired a boat to accompany the monitors plus a handful of hasakas out to sea.

At around the three-mile limit, the small flotilla was approached and repeatedly circled by two Israeli gunboats. The engines of the hasakas were cut as the waves caused by the gunboats’ backwash rose and fell. After about 20 minutes, the gunboats withdrew as a third military vessel, deploying water cannon, arrived.

A powerful jet of water was targeted at the Oliva, causing the boat to rock dangerously and drenching those aboard. After repeated dousings, the Oliva’s captain ordered the four passengers to clamber on to an adjacent hasaka, fearing his boat was about to sink. As the Oliva’s engine was hit by the military vessel, he too was forced to abandon ship.

From a distance it seemed impossible that the Oliva would not go under. But its captain and other fishermen managed to secure a rope to try to tow it back to port. The military boat followed the Oliva and the other boats at some speed, still firing its water cannon, for several minutes.

According to Salah Ammar, the Oliva’s captain, the boats were within the three-mile limit. “We don’t even reach two miles before they chase us with guns and water [cannon],” he said.

However, GPS co-ordinates taken by the Guardian during Wednesday’s encounter showed the position of the boats to be outside the permitted zone.

In a statement, the Israeli Defence Force said: “The ongoing hostilities between Israel and Palestinian terror organisations create significant security risks along the coast of the Gaza Strip. Due to these risks, fishing along the coasts has been restricted to a distance of three nautical miles from shore. Fishermen in Gaza are aware of these restrictions as they have been notified of them on numerous occasions. The restrictions and their enforcement by the Israel navy are in complete accordance with international law.”

The United Nations and human rights organisations say the fishing restriction is collective punishment in violation of international law.

Shaheen rejects Israel’s justification. “The Israeli navy has never found evidence that fishermen involved in violations have been involved weapons smuggling,” he said. The “environment of daily harassment” was part of Israel’s “illegal collective punishment and closure of Gaza”.

The Oliva’s engine was damaged in Wednesday’s encounter but Ammar was planning to go out to sea again the next day if he could locate the parts he needed to fix it. “Every time I know what will happen. They will shoot water on me, fire bullets. But I get hundreds of calls asking, ‘When will you go out?'” The fishermen, he says, want the protection they believe is afforded by the presence of international monitors on board the boat.

Asi, back at the port after his aborted fishing trip, was puzzled by the military’s aggression towards fisherman whose faces, he says, the soldiers must recognise after repeated encounters. “The point is not security for the Israelis. They know everything. They arrested many of us and searched many boats and never found anything.”

His morning’s haul consisted of one large sea bass, sold for 150 shekels, and three smaller, worthless fish. After deducting 50 shekels for fuel, 50 shekels for bait, and 10 shekels to put aside for his boat’s maintenance, he and his assistant pocketed 20 shekels (£3.60) each for their day’s work.

Would he be going out again the next day? “Inshallah [if God wills it]. This is the only source I have to feed my family.”

Escalation of attacks by the Israeli navy on the CPS Gaza boat

23 July 2011 | Civil Peace Service Gaza

Footage of the second water-cannon attack by the Israeli navy against the Civil Peace Service Gaza boat “Oliva” on Thursday, July 14, 2011. The camera used was lost in the sea when the crew evacuated the “Oliva,” recovered in a fishing net, and returned on Wednesday, July 20.

Human rights workers continues to face Israeli aggression in Gazan waters

20 July 2011 | Civil Peace Service Gaza

The Israeli navy attacked Civil Peace Service Gaza volunteers along with international press and Palestinian fishermen today. One of the Israeli ships targeted the boats with high pressure water cannons.

Meanwhile, a small naval boat approached the Oliva and hit it from behind, stopping the boat and causing serious damage to the engine. The crew aboard the Oliva was evacuated to other boats and all the boats at sea were forced to turn back.

Joe Catron, an American human rights worker aboard the Oliva, stated, “Israel has been regularly attacking Palestinian fishermen within the purported 3 nautical mile fishing limit. The livelihood of many Gazans relies on fishing and Israel has been using live ammunition and water cannons to prevent fishermen from doing their work. We will continue to go out with the Palestinians and document human rights violations, despite the powerful threats we and Gazan fishermen face.”

This is the fourth attack on Oliva in less than two week. To watch and read recent reports in the news media about CPS Gaza, visit Al Jazeera and The Guardian.

Journalists and TV Crews are invited to join the CPSGaza boat.

Civil Peace Service Gaza is an international, third party, non-violent initiative to monitor potential human rights violations in Gazan territorial waters.