At Al-Bahar fish farm in Gaza, a Palestinian family holding long-handled nets attempt to catch sea bream from a tank.
There are squeals as a boy pulls out a fish, one of half a dozen that will shortly be gutted and grilled in the farm’s adjoining restaurant.
The farm sits on a small rise above a beach, and looks out over the breaking surf of the Mediterranean. Alongside its restaurant and aquarium, Al-Bahar boasts a playground, and visitors flock there for a novel day out.
For its owners, however, Al-Bahar represents the possibility of something much more substantial: providing Palestinians with a new source of fish supplies – and reducing their dependence on imports from Israel.
The Palestinian fishing industry operates under strictly enforced restrictions. An exclusion zone policed by Israel limits the industry’s range to within six miles off Gaza’s coast. Fishermen risk being shot at, arrested and having their catch confiscated.
Fish stocks in the zone are low, and Gaza’s fleet struggles to catch enough fish to supply the domestic market. As a result, markets currently sell sea bream – the area’s most popular restaurant fish – which they import twice a week from Israeli fish farms.
Al-Bahar, whose 12 massive fish tanks were built at a cost of $1.2m (£900,000), is the most successful of four fish farms that have sprung up in Gaza since the 2014 war with Israel, and it is preparing to build an adjoining plot for a second commercial fish farm, . to be ready within a year.
For now, its fish are raised from fish fry and eggs bought from Israel, which also supplies the farm’s protein-rich fish food, but the owner, Yassir al-Haj, is contemplating opening a hatchery so that he no longer needs to import fry and eggs.
Haj said the farm produces 120,000kg of bream a year – enough to supply the private customers who come to his farm and restaurant but well short of the amount needed to supply commercial dealers. “Dealers come to us, but we can’t provide them with fish yet, which is why we are building a second farm which will be able to produce 200,000 kg,” Haj said.
Moreover, he added, the price of sea bream puts it out of the range of all but Gaza’s elite. “Only a few people who have high salaries can afford to come here,” he said.
All the farms in Gaza are vulnerable to the instabilities resulting from Hamas rule. But Haj said the biggest barrier to expansion is the unreliable supply of electricity to a business that needs power 24 hours a day to oxygenate the tanks and keep the fish alive. “I need to have two back-up generators. They cost me $100,000. If I lived anywhere else except for Gaza, I wouldn’t need that cost.”
It is a problem well known to another Gaza fish farmer. Behind a fence in a seaside plot not far from the southern city of Khan Younis, Mohammed Salmi, 21, is minding his father’s tanks.
“My father worked for 30 years in Israel at a fish farm,” Salmi said. “It was his dream to open a fish farm in Gaza.”
Far smaller than Al-Bahar, the farm run by the Salmi family lost its first shrimp harvest after a power cut on the main tank. Now the family are trying their hand at faredi – a small orange fish that is more robust than shrimp and can survive on only 12 hours of electricity a day. Nevertheless, the family have ordered solar panels as a back-up to keep their fish alive.
“We lost 1 million shrimp last year,” Salmi said. “So now we are afraid all the time of power shortages. But when the solar comes – hopefully within a month – we should be fine.”
As at Al-Bahar, the family plan to build a restaurant and a petrol station for their customers, who come from across the Gaza Strip. In another parallel, Sami said the farm’s popularity with private customers means there is not enough fish to supply Gaza’s dealers.
Back at Al-Bahar, Basil Abu Sahal is buying 2kg of fish to be cooked for his family. “It’s the first time I’ve been here,” he said. “I’m testing it out, but it’s almost the same price you pay in the market.” Part of the appeal, he said, was that the fish was better than that caught in Gaza’s polluted sea waters.
The bream is cooked, and Sahal sits down to eat his farmed fish with his family, at a table looking out over the sea.
