By Sõzarn Barday
When fishermen cannot safely reach the waters that sustain their communities, the crisis is not only economic. It raises fundamental questions about civilian protection, occupation and the limits of international law.
The sea is visible from Gaza’s shore. For generations, it has offered Palestinian families food, income and a livelihood passed from one generation to the next. Yet visibility is not access, and a coastline is not the same as freedom to use it.
For Gaza’s fishermen, the Mediterranean has become a space defined by restrictions, insecurity and uncertainty. The question is no longer simply how far a boat can travel before encountering a maritime boundary. It is whether a population can meaningfully feed itself when access to one of its traditional sources of food is controlled by an outside power.
This is where Gaza’s fishing crisis becomes more than a story about a damaged industry. It becomes a question of food sovereignty: the ability of a people to sustain themselves through their own food systems, resources and labour.
The distinction matters. Humanitarian aid can provide food when people cannot obtain it themselves. But aid and the ability to produce food are not interchangeable. A population that depends entirely on supplies brought in from elsewhere has lost something beyond income: the capacity to determine, at least in part, how it feeds itself.
In Gaza, where fishing has long supported coastal communities, the consequences of losing that capacity are particularly severe.
A boundary drawn across a livelihood
Restrictions on Palestinian fishing did not begin with the war that followed 7 October 2023. They developed over decades, with permissible fishing zones changing repeatedly.
The Oslo Accords envisaged a fishing area extending up to 20 nautical miles from Gaza’s coast. In practice, Israeli restrictions have frequently reduced the distance fishermen could travel. In 2017, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that fishermen had generally been allowed access to only six nautical miles since 2006, temporarily extended to nine nautical miles during some periods.
These limits had material consequences. Fish available closer to shore tended to be smaller, reducing the value of catches and narrowing the opportunities available to fishermen. Restrictions were also enforced through arrests, equipment confiscation and the use of live ammunition, according to OCHA.
In 2016, a temporary expansion of the fishing zone along part of Gaza’s coast was followed by a substantial increase in the recorded catch. OCHA reported that the catch rose from 81.2 tonnes in April 2015 to 446.8 tonnes in April 2016, following an expansion of access in April 2016. The comparison does not, by itself, establish that access was the only factor involved. It nevertheless illustrates how changes to maritime access can have immediate economic consequences.
The distance a fisherman is permitted to travel is therefore not an abstract measurement. It influences what he can catch, what he can sell and whether his work can sustain his family.
The sea becomes an economic boundary long before it becomes a physical one.
When the fishing industry collapses
The destruction and restriction of fishing since October 2023 have intensified a crisis that was already years in the making.
A UN Protection Cluster report published in May 2025 described the devastating impact of attacks on fishermen and fishing infrastructure. Drawing on information from humanitarian organisations and other sources, it documented damage to boats and landing sites, attacks on fishermen and the near-collapse of fishing operations.
The report recorded that, between 1 January and 16 May 2025, the UN human rights office had documented 28 incidents involving fishermen, resulting in 11 deaths and 34 injuries. These figures cover that specific reporting period, not the total number of casualties throughout the war.
The significance extends beyond the immediate incidents. Fishing requires boats, nets, fuel, landing sites, repairs, markets and workers who can safely reach the water. Destroying or disabling one part of this system can undermine the others. A surviving boat offers little economic value if its owner cannot safely sail, while reopening access to the sea cannot immediately restore an industry whose infrastructure has been destroyed.
The effects also travel beyond the people on the boats. Fish traders lose stock. Repair workers lose customers. Families lose income. Communities lose a source of protein at the very moment when access to food is most precarious.
This is why the destruction of fishing infrastructure must be understood as a question of civilian survival as well as economic damage.
The loss of a boat is not simply the loss of property. In circumstances where alternative livelihoods are scarce, it can mean the loss of a family’s remaining means of obtaining food and earning money.
What does international law actually require?
International law does not give states unlimited authority to restrict civilian activity simply because a conflict is taking place. Nor does it prohibit every security restriction imposed at sea. The legal assessment depends on the applicable rules, the circumstances and the effects of particular measures.
The International Committee of the Red Cross considers Gaza to remain occupied territory under international humanitarian law, citing Israel’s continuing effective control over key aspects of the territory, including access by sea. Israel disputes aspects of the legal characterisation of its responsibilities following its 2005 withdrawal from Gaza. The ICRC’s position is that occupation law continues to apply.
This distinction is important because occupation law imposes responsibilities towards the civilian population. Article 55 of the Fourth Geneva Convention requires an occupying power, to the fullest extent of the means available to it, to ensure food and medical supplies for the population. Article 59 addresses relief schemes when the population is inadequately supplied.
These obligations do not automatically establish a right to fish at any distance under any circumstances. They do, however, make the civilian consequences of maritime restrictions legally significant.
International humanitarian law also requires parties to an armed conflict to distinguish between civilians and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives. Fishermen remain civilians unless and for such time as they directly participate in hostilities. Their occupation alone does not make them lawful targets.
The law also prohibits using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. It protects objects indispensable to civilian survival against certain forms of attack, destruction or removal, subject to the precise terms of the applicable rules.
Whether a particular attack or restriction violates these provisions must be established through evidence and legal analysis. The destruction of a fishing boat does not automatically prove a war crime, just as invoking security does not automatically make a measure lawful.
But these legal distinctions should not obscure the central issue: when the ability to obtain food is severely restricted, the consequences for civilian survival cannot be treated as incidental or irrelevant.
A serious legal assessment must consider what happened, why it happened, who was responsible and how the measure affected the civilian population.
The limits of a security argument
Israel has cited security concerns to justify restrictions on access to Gaza’s waters. Such concerns must be assessed under the applicable law, rather than dismissed without examination.
But security is not a limitless justification. Depending on the legal framework involved, restrictions may be constrained by requirements relating to necessity, proportionality, humane treatment and the protection of civilians. A naval blockade, for example, is subject to rules governing its establishment and enforcement, including prohibitions on starving civilians and restrictions concerning excessive civilian harm.
The existence of a blockade does not settle every question about the legality of maritime restrictions, and the legal rules governing a blockade should not be confused with those governing occupation.
The relevant question is whether particular measures comply with the rules that apply to them and with the wider obligations owed to civilians.
That question becomes especially urgent when restrictions on fishing occur alongside damage to agricultural land, the destruction of food-production infrastructure and severe limitations on the availability of essential supplies.
In such circumstances, the cumulative impact d eserves scrutiny. A population’s access to food depends on an interconnected system of production, transport, trade and humanitarian assistance. The destruction or restriction of several parts of that system can have consequences far greater than any single measure considered in isolation.
International law must be applied to the facts, not merely invoked as a vocabulary for describing them.
The difference between receiving food and having the means to produce it
Food sovereignty offers a useful way to understand what is at stake, but it should not be mistaken for a standalone legal rule that automatically determines whether a particular restriction is lawful.
It is an analytical framework for asking a broader question: what happens when people lose control over the systems that once helped sustain them?
For Gaza’s fishermen, the answer includes more than hunger. It includes the erosion of skills, the disappearance of markets and the weakening of an industry that supported households across generations.
Once fishing becomes impossible or prohibitively dangerous, replacing the lost income is not straightforward. Boats and equipment may be destroyed. Repair materials may be unavailable. Markets may cease functioning. Even if restrictions are later relaxed, rebuilding the industry requires investment, infrastructure and a measure of security.
The consequences can therefore continue long after the immediate restrictions change.
This is the deeper economic significance of the fishing crisis. It is not only about the quantity of fish reaching a market today. It is about whether Gaza will retain the capacity to sustain a functioning fishing industry tomorrow.
Humanitarian assistance remains essential when civilians lack food. But assistance cannot, on its own, restore the economic systems that allow communities to support themselves. That requires safe access, functioning infrastructure, the availability of equipment and the ability to work without unlawful interference.
The right to receive assistance and the ability to earn a living are different things. Both matter.
International law cannot end at the shoreline
The international community has documented restrictions on Gaza’s fishing industry for years. UN agencies have reported on their effects, while humanitarian organisations have raised serious concerns about the destruction of fishing infrastructure and the safety of fishermen.
Documentation is necessary. It establishes evidence, informs public understanding and can support future accountability. But documentation is not the same as protection.
A report cannot, by itself, reopen a harbour. A legal principle cannot repair a boat. And recognition of a civilian’s rights does not guarantee that those rights can be exercised.
This is not an argument that international law is meaningless. Its rules establish obligations, provide standards for evaluating conduct and create pathways for investigation and accountability. The problem is the distance between those protections and the conditions civilians actually experience.
Closing that distance requires more than statements of concern. It requires effective measures to protect civilians, ensure humanitarian access, investigate credible allegations of unlawful conduct and support the restoration of essential civilian infrastructure.
For Gaza’s fishing communities, recovery would mean more than putting boats back in the water. It would require conditions in which fishermen can access the sea safely, obtain equipment, sell their catch and rebuild livelihoods without facing arbitrary or unlawful restrictions.
It would also require attention to the wider food system, so that restoring fishing forms part of a broader effort to rebuild civilian life rather than an isolated economic intervention.
Who controls the conditions of survival?
Gaza’s fishing crisis reveals a difficult truth about the relationship between law, security and economic freedom. A population can possess natural resources and still lack meaningful access to them. It can have a coastline without being able to rely on the sea. It can have legal protections without being able to exercise them in practice.
That is why this story cannot be reduced to the question of how far a fishing boat may travel.
The deeper issue is whether civilians can retain the means to sustain themselves when access to essential resources is subject to military control.
International law does not promise a life without risk or guarantee that every economic activity will continue uninterrupted during war. It does, however, impose limits on the conduct of conflict and obligations towards civilians whose survival depends on access to food and other necessities.
Those limits must have practical consequences. Otherwise, the distance between a recognised right and a lived reality becomes a measure of the international system’s failure to protect the people it was designed to serve.
The Mediterranean remains beyond Gaza’s shore. Its waters still contain the possibility of food, income and a future for the communities that have depended on them.
The question is whether Palestinian fishermen will be able to reach that future.
Because when a people lose access to the means of feeding themselves, the issue is no longer only who controls the sea. It is who controls the conditions under which they can survive—and whether international law is capable of placing meaningful limits on that control.
Sõzarn Barday is a lawyer and author who writes on human rights, international law and public policy. The views expressed are her own.