Navigating Gaza’s Weaponised Sea
Resistance against energy extraction projects in Palestine’s waters
Navigating Gaza’s Weaponised Sea
Resistance against energy extraction projects in Palestine’s waters
Written by Aya Bseiso. Edited by: Sara El-Jazzara
A Growing Culture x Shado Mag
Living in a protracted state of displacement, and forced to play witness to rude negotiations and agreements attempting to annex our Palestinian land, I dream. I dream that I am walking alongside a never-ending wall, my feet carrying the sand from the shore. I hear the sound of the waves. I know I am walking Gaza’s sea, but I cannot see it. My grandmother whispers to me that our compass, our allegiance, will always be to the sea. Bahr Gaza. Each of us, even in exile, are inducted, thrown into the water. With our movements, we measure the sea’s parameters and boundaries.
We learn to navigate its calm and troubled waters by meandering through and pushing past its boundaries. Our bodies are in constant negotiation with the push and pull of the sea. Our entrance is bound by an understanding of both its visible and invisible boundaries and borders. We notice the buoy line. We are bound by the borders of a maritime agreement.
Gaza’s sea acts as the last remaining gateway for its besieged population, promising freedom and survival. The sea, to the naked eye, is an endless blue resting on a distant horizon. In truth, it is blood-stained, sewage-filled, and blockaded. A surveilled body of water, with an ever-shifting set of maritime borders enforced by a settler-colonial power.
This piece attempts to narrate the lethal and precarious agendas behind the shifting borders, securitised and reinforced by energy extraction projects, in Gaza’s sea. From the vantage point of fishers navigating and resisting invisibilised border frontiers, such testimonies became grounds to reveal the systems that have engineered a weaponisation of the sea. It is only through the acts and gestures of Gaza’s fishers, resolute in their defiance to continue to access and contest an impossibly patrolled sea, that we are able to map out these borders.
Let me see the sea…
To the Palestinians in the West Bank, separated by impossible checkpoints and permits, the sight and scent of the sea remains a distant memory and a constant longing. In line with Israel’s politics of fragmentation that police, surveil, and criminalise the movement of Palestinians across and within three distinct territories of settler-colonial control (Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip), Israel, since 1993, has effectively enforced a closure, sealing off the movement of Palestinians, except by persons in possession of permits issued by Israel.
In parallel, Israel deployed policies that captured infrastructures which control and manage Gaza’s borders, economy and sea, to attain total control on the mobility of bodies and goods, within the Strip and outside of it. Through the severing of infrastructures of mobility, the settler-colonial power enforces a new cartography of control on the Palestinian terrain, both by land and sea.
In the aftermath of the Oslo Accords in 1994, Israel restricted the maritime zone to 20 nautical miles (nm) in Gaza, permitting Palestinians the right to engage in fishing, recreational and economic activities at sea within the designated zone.
However, access to the sea, within the designated maritime zone, would never be realised. The fishers are permitted entrance to the sea only through a tightly managed system of permits and licenses–administered within each local, the Gaza port, Deir Al Balah, Al Mawasi–Khan Younis, and Al Mawasi–Rafah, to a set number of boats (within a permissible distance).
Irrespective of permits or mandated fishing zones, which fluctuate on Israeli whim, fisherfolk are regularly targeted and arrested by the Israeli Navy, in addition to the confiscation of their boats and fishing nets.
Israel’s decades-long control of the sea began long before the blockade. As early as 2002, Abu Hasira, a fisherman in Gaza, documents his experience entering the sea: “One day, I got a permit from the Israeli authority to fish within one and a half mile[s] only. I remember it was a Thursday, exactly at 10 in the morning. Suddenly, an Israeli patrol boat appeared in front of us. The officer ordered us to lift the nets from the water. Next, he ordered all eleven of us into one boat. The Israelis arrested three of the fishermen. Two of them were my sons.”
Just like today, the Israeli government knew their actions in 2002 were unlawful, but drove forwards with them anyway. A case in point – in this same year, the Bertini Commitment would attempt to ease maritime restrictions on the fishers by an internationally mandated extension of the fishing zone with no arrests of fishers nor confiscations of fishing boats within 12nm. The agreement would, of course, never fully be implemented.
Countless reports have accounted for the shifting access to the sea over the years, since Israel laid its siege on Gaza in 2007, and imposed a complete blockade of the Strip. Palestinian fishers have been systematically denied the ability to go further than 15nm into Gaza’s sea, if at all. The fishing zone over the years has arbitrarily shrunk and expanded from 6nm, to 3 nm, to 12nm, to total maritime closure.
Through the simple act of entering the sea, fisherfolk contend with the real possibility of death. This point proved grotesquely true when, four years ago, three Palestinian fishermen were killed as an Israeli drone got caught in their fishing net.
The impending brutal violence comes slowly through bankruptcy – the cost of fuel often too high to warrant a journey to sea – and more abruptly with Israel’s most recent malicious forced-starvation of the Strip. Since 2nd March 2025, Israel has denied the entry of all humanitarian aid into Gaza – another clear attempt to accelerate the weaponisation and engineering of famine for political gain.
The making of a “no-man’s sea”
In order to ensure maximum gas extraction and export potential, Israel, with the blessing of the United States’ big oil and gas corporations, has intensified, tightened and expanded its siege and control of Palestinian waters over the years. Enforced through an arsenal of weaponry, including close-quarter patrols of Gaza’s seas armed with live ammunition, drones, water cannons, and advanced missile systems, all deployed to shepherd the movement of Gaza’s fishermen away from an expanding energy imperialism project in the Mediterranean sea.
While Israel’s targeting and destruction of Gaza’s fishing sector has been widely documented, few place the unfolding restrictions of fishing zones within a larger context of securitisation and control of oil and gas infrastructures, which has rendered the sea a militarised and highly securitised frontier.
In 1999, with the discovery of the Gaza Marine and Border Field natural gas reserves, the Palestinian Authority (PA) and British Gas negotiated a 25-year contract that would never materialise. The project ambitiously set out to utilise the gas reserves to generate electricity to power Gaza’s only desalination plant, ensuring Palestinian access to both water and electricity.
With the discovery of the Palestinian gas reserves, Israel also began developing offshore gas fields. In 2001, US energy corporation, Noble Energy (now Chevron), which was developing the bordering Israeli gas fields, Mari-B and Noa, legally challenged British Gas’s PA-issued license. Noble Energy claimed the territory was disputed and that the PA had no authority over the waters. Despite the Gaza Marine being well within the maritime zone, resting at 19.4nm from Gaza’s coastline, and the Border Field, straddling the international boundary between Palestinian and Israeli waters, the court ultimately ruled the sea surrounding the Gaza Marine a “no-man’s sea.”
The distant gas reserves, holding the promise of energy independence, would be yet another embodiment of the slew of failed and unrealised Palestinian national projects, alongside the rubble of Gaza’s forgotten airport, and the ruins of the sea-port both targeted by Israel in 2001. In the remains of these infrastructures and undeveloped projects, is a contemporary history of how through mechanisms of colonial control, which surveil and monitor movement, Palestinians have become entirely dependent on Israel’s provision of life sustaining infrastructures and systems.
Manoeuvring the last border frontier
The most stark example, which makes visible the sinister motives behind the restrictions of fishing zones, is the building of the El-Arish-Ashkelon natural gas pipeline, by Israel and the Egyptian East Mediterranean Gas (EMG) energy corporation in 2005.
The subsea pipeline, which skirts the Gazan shoreline and the nearby Palestinian oil and gas fields, was negotiated with a complete disregard of any Palestinian presence and in line with the ruling of the “no man’s sea.” Simultaneous to the operation of the pipeline three years later, and in the aftermath of the 2008 ‘Operation Cast Lead,’ Israel would take full control of the Palestinian natural gas fields (UNCTAD) and shrink the fishing zone to 3nm.
Not only would Israel go ahead and deplete the Mari-B and Noa gas fields in 2012 and 2019, despite the risk of draining the adjacent inaccessible Palestinian reserves – it would be adamant in its refusal to any possibility of Palestinian extraction, under the guise of national security.
In the subsequent years of ceasefires, the fishing zone shifted 15 to 20 times, as Israel worked to form the ideal political and business climate, in order to facilitate the infrastructural development and expansion of its energy sector into Palestinian territorial waters.
On October 29th, 2023, Israel brazenly awarded gas exploration licenses in Palestinian maritime waters to multinational corporations, Eni, SOCAR and British Petroleum, expanding what it considers to be ‘de-facto’ Israeli-controlled waters as it carried on the bloodshed and occupation of Palestine. Despite shaking shareholder confidence on a troubling political climate, the insistence to continue ‘business as usual’ becomes yet another clear signal that the expansion of Israel’s energy sector, and the benefits it reaps cannot happen in the absence of siege, occupation and genocide.
With impunity, Israel has continued to extract and export natural gas to Jordan, Egypt and the European Union during the genocide – profiting and fueling the genocidal warfare we are witnessing today. The increasing investment of European energy companies in Israeli gas makes the EU and its companies complicit in funnelling this “unprecedented investment” into the settler economy, as it spends billions on a genocidal campaign.
Thus, Israel time and time again has been given the blessing of energy corporations and the international community to cut off Palestinian access to the sea, while continuing to negotiate energy extraction projects and export deals. This further bolsters a settler-colonial political economy that seeks to legitimise itself as a strategic partner in global energy security.
The capture of infrastructures and maritime enclosure
We are only able to make some sense of the ever-shifting fishing zone if we are to acknowledge the wider context of enforced securitisation and entrapment at sea to ensure Israeli gas exports. Israeli officials have openly spoken of their intention for full maritime control and occupation of Palestinian waters citing the need to protect Israeli energy infrastructure as a matter of national security.
A wider net must be cast to effectively disentangle the arbitrary enforcement of fishing zones over the years, in order to make sense of how a de-facto state of total maritime enclosure has come to pass.
On October 9th 2023 Israel would cut off water and electricity supply: a shutdown it has maintained for 15 months. The genocide today is in reality the accumulation of 17 years of international silence to Israeli pariah policies of siege and occupation, where Israel has systematically destroyed and manipulated Gaza’s infrastructural networks.
With the destruction of plants and pumping stations, wastewater and sewage overflow into the streets and open spaces–ultimately reaching the sea–carrying with them the outbreaks of cholera and typhoid. Satellite images have captured large spills of what appears to be sewage, visible from above, flowing into Gaza’s sea.
Thus, not only is Gaza’s economy completely severed from the global economy but access to critical life-sustaining systems is managed totally by a settler-colonial power.
The act of fishing in a state of genocide is no longer a simple act of braving the temperament of the sea. Instead, it is a constant navigation of invisible layers of colonial occupation, exploitation and extraction, enacted upon a besieged Mediterranean sea-bed.
Navigating the illusion of a borderless sea
Abu Ghanem, a displaced fisher living in the tent encampment of Al Mawasi, near Khan Younis, reported: “I used to work on my boat with my children… 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.” Without failure, Israel cuts off fishers’ access to the sea in every offensive it unleashes on the Strip. Routinely, and most brazenly today, Israel deploys its denial of Palestinian access to electricity, water, food, and the sea, as a political bargaining chip.
The fisher’s entrance and movement, within the illusion of a borderless sea, must be meticulously calculated as the body, managed, controlled and surveilled, past the sniper gaze of an Israeli soldier. In their voyages, with their movements, the fishers come to produce an urgent mapping of the lethal and ever-expanding infrastructures of Israel’s natural gas project into Palestinian waters.
While physically severed from the sea, the fishers of Gaza maintain the image and scent of a sea, which carries the defiance of hope for liberation and return.
What can you do?
Download and post this toolkit: ‘Disrupting Energy Corporations for the Liberation of Palestine.
Create a cost to complicity:
As an unending supply of American weapons, transported via European ports, obliterates Gaza, Israel continues to escalate its genocidal campaign. European movements must step up their opposition against the fuellers and financiers of this genocide. The blatant complicity of the European Union and its member states in this ongoing genocide and colonisation of Palestine is multiplicitous and must be resisted on all fronts. One such critical front is the import and integration of Israeli gas into the European energy system
It must be stopped.
Fossil fuel supply chains fuel and fund settler colonialism and the ongoing genocide in Palestine. While military violence continues to intensify, gas supply chains have powered slow violence and ethnic cleansing for decades.
Gas is used to normalise the settler occupation, legitimising Israel as a strategic partner in energy deals and climate policy.
Grassroots movements – divestment and climate campaigners, students and unions together – can organise in solidarity with Palestinians against the import of Israeli gas to Europe.
Take action:
Pressure Eni and Dana Petroleum’s shareholders and institutions to divest.
Divest your own pension funds from Eni and Dana Petroleum.
Pressure the European Union and member states to stop gas imports from Israel
Occupy corporate headquarters and events.
Read and amplify the joint struggles in Palestine, Nigeria, Mozambique (and more) by organising solidarity actions with the activists fighting the colonial legacies of oil and gas exploitation.
This is the last of a series of articles published in collaboration with Shado Mag. In previous installments, we explored how humanity and the natural world are completely entwined, offering examples of Indigenous knowledge systems and tools that can be used to dismantle exploitation and build a more equitable future. Make sure to check them out if you missed them! We’ve got stories from Nigeria, Kenya, Ecuador, Philippines and the Arctic. We thank our comrades at Shado Mag and all the guest writers and artists for making this series possible.
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As always, thank you for reading.
Wow - this post is full of lies! There is no mention that the Palestinians rejected five peace deals. They have also been given millions of $$ from the US, Europe, and Israel to build a real country but instead used it to create an extensive underground tunnel system used to destroy Israel. This resulted in a horrific massacre of Israelis and people from other countries on October 7th. Holocaust survivors were taken as hostages and murdered. People attending a music festival were brutally raped and murdered. Babies were put in ovens to perish. Two hundred fifty hostages from Israel were taken by Hamas and were hidden in regular Gazen homes. Not one Gazen had the courage or will to save these hostages. Stop blaming Israel for destroying Gazen's lives. The blame is on Hamas and its benefactor, the Iranian regime. Israel is currently doing the dirty work for the world but bringing down this level of the Iranian regime. The people of Iran are cheering Israel for their efforts. Hopefully, they get the freedom they deserve. Please, please stop these lies and be on the right side of history.