Imagine that, while you go to the beach – costume, slippers and umbrella under one arm – someone told you that not, on that piece of land and in that sea, infinite and nobody, you can no longer set foot. Imagine if they told you that from now on that splendid sea of your city or your place of the heart is a “No-go zones”, Where you can no longer go to swim or fish.
This is what is happening to Gaza. This too, yes. Here, in this strip of land that also lived in the sea, this was also denied, perhaps the last bulwark of a semblance of freedom.
The Israeli defense forces (IDF), in fact, have issued a hard warning in these hours by ordering the Palestinians not to fish or not swimming in the Mediterranean Sea and prohibiting any form of access to the sea.
The restriction was implemented despite almost 900 thousand displaced Palestinians who have taken refuge in Al-Mawasi, a coastal town now crowded with curtains that host families whose houses have been destroyed since 7 October 2023.
For decades, the Mediterranean coasts were the anchor of salvation of Gaza, its source of food and income, but also a place of refuge and of leak from the reality of Israeli employment. But now, after 21 months of war, that last refuge has also been sealed.
Israel therefore issued military orders that prohibit Palestinians from accessing one of their latest sources of joy: the sea.
The forces will deal with any violation of these restrictions – said the Israeli military spokesman Avichay Adraee in an X post. We urge the fishermen, swimmers and divers to refrain from entering the sea. Entering the sea along the strip puts you at risk.
Meanwhile, this last few hours is the news that the Israeli government has proposed to force about 600 thousand Palestinians – and onwards the entire population of Gaza – to enter a fenced “humanitarian city”, to be built on the ruins of Rafah, in the Southern Gaza Strip. The plan plans to “select” the population, separate the alleged members of Hamas and then press pressure on the remaining civilians – men, women and children – so that they leave Gaza “voluntarily” for another country.
Video show Israeli Forces Opening Fire AT #Gaza Fishermen’s Boats.
Recently, The Iof Issued a New Directive Banning Palestinians in Gaza from Swimming in The Sea and Fishermen from Setting Out in the Waters.
The Sea is the Last Resort for Gazens, and Many Rely on Fish for … pic.twitter.com/1Sinqifchh
– At the Mayadeen English (@Mayadenenglish) July 15, 2025
If all this seems unthinkable to you, look at what has already happened
For almost two years, the world has been attending – often in silence, sometimes with complicity – to an unprecedented humanitarian tragedy in Gaza. More than 55,000 Palestinian people Women and children have been killed in large part. Indoor neighborhoods have been deleted from bombings that have affected hospitals, schools, refugee camps, mosques. Even ambulances and ovens.
To Gaza la hunger has become a weapondeliberately used to weaken resistance and annihilate all hope. The aid trucks are blocked or attached, while the population survives between rubble and despair. A famine that has the role of one collective punishment studied in detail. It is difficult to find the words to tell the horror, but it is even more difficult to accept our silence. We have already turned our backs in Gaza too many times: when the children were buried under the rubble, when the refugee camps were razed to the ground with the bombs that we helped to finance, when we convinced ourselves that “a limit” really existed.
But now it’s no longer just a suspicion: Israeli Minister Katz said it clearly. The next step is the mass internment and the forced deportation of the Palestinian population. And if we do not find the courage to indign ourselves now, we will fail again. Again.
