Everyone in Gaza Is a Sea Person
· The Atlantic
Here in Gaza, war has changed everything, even the sea. During the long, hot summer, children went to the beach either early in the morning or just before sunset. They stepped around piles of garbage, and the tents of displaced families, to wade into water contaminated by sewage.
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And yet, they went. We all did. And I think we always will.
I recently started aiming to take 10,000 steps a day, to get back in shape. To reach that number, I walk from my home to the seafront road and back. I have been doing this for a month now. The distance to the shore and back happens to be 10,000 steps. Which means that, really, my aim was never the step count, but the Mediterranean.
I go before sunset, when the heat starts to ease slightly. Not that it ever gets truly cool. July and August brought the worst of the humidity, which sometimes reached 86 percent. As I walk, I watch the sunlight stretch across the water before it slowly disappears.
A few children still fly kites along the beach. Kite-flying was common in Gaza before the war and even during it—just a month ago, the sky above the sea was full of kites almost constantly—but now it has become an act of defiance, because the Israelis have said that they will treat kite-flying as a hostile act, on the grounds that kites were sometimes used, before the war, to launch incendiary devices into Israel.
In the past, children fashioned kites from brightly colored paper and wooden sticks they bought at stationery stores. Now they improvise, using whatever they can find. Some work with dry palm fronds. I met a boy who had carved his kite’s frame from a long piece of wood; others weave frames from plastic bags, or from the sacks that once carried flour and food aid, joining the edges with torn scraps from old notebooks.
[Ghada Abdulfattah: Feeding a family of seven in Gaza]
Everyone in Gaza is a sea person. That 25-mile coastline is more than a place to walk or fly a kite; it’s a point of access to the outside world. In past summers, all of Gaza would seem to be at the shore—sitting on the beach, or maybe higher up, in wooden chairs near the road. Children dashed in and out of the water, or rode camels or horses along the water for a small fee. Vendors sold grilled corn, lupin beans, and cotton candy, circulating among the blankets with sweet tea and roasted seeds. Some families pitched tents right at the shoreline. People posed there for selfies or wedding photos. The air smelled of corn and charcoal; you’d hear the clatter of backgammon stones, the hiss of a narghile being lit. Sometimes the sound of the sea drowned out nearly everything else.
One of my enduring memories of the seashore is from July 2023. My nephews and nieces dug holes in the sand to bury themselves, then ran to the water to wash off, then came back to start digging all over again. The adults swam, pretended to swim, pushed whoever wasn’t swimming into the water anyway. We cracked open a watermelon, hoping it would be ripe—too sweet, too red, and a little sandy, the way we liked it. When I was about 6 years old, my parents took us to the beach to crack open a watermelon just like that. My siblings and I still laugh about this when we remember: Did we go to the sea just to eat a watermelon and go home? No swimming, no playing, no walking—just the watermelon, and then back. Now the stretch of sand where we did this has become a makeshift camp crowded with families displaced from the north and south of the Gaza Strip.
We are more than 2 million people living on a ribbon of land about 25 miles long and seven and a half miles wide. This makes Gaza one of the most densely populated places on earth. Before the war, to leave the Strip from any direction required a permit. But the sea asked for nothing. You didn’t need a document to look at it, to wade into it, to let your eyes follow it to a horizon with no drone or checkpoint in sight. The sea was our open horizon, the place we went when we needed to breathe. When I was in a bad mood, my mother would tell me to go there.
In the last years before the war, the shore was lined with tourist facilities: chalets, amusement parks, restaurants, and other amenities that welcomed thousands of visitors every summer. Now these are mostly gone, and the few that remain are affordable for only a privileged few. Throughout the Strip, prices are high, air strikes continue, and about half of Gazans now live in tents, which offer little shelter from the scorching summer heat. More than 60 percent of Gaza has become inaccessible, as the so-called yellow line expands westward, pushing people ever closer to the sea. For many of us, the need to be in contact with the water has grown as the space around us has constricted: A person needs a place—any place—to escape the feeling of being trapped.
A few weeks ago, I met a fisherman named Hasan Shehada. He told me that Gaza’s port services and many of its fishing boats had been destroyed in the war, and that going out on the water is still dangerous because of Israeli naval fire. Before the war, together with other fishermen, some of them his siblings and cousins, he could bring in enough fish to feed his eight-member family and still earn an income. Now he lacks the boats or equipment that once made this work possible.
[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib: Flying over my battered homeland]
“The war has changed our sea too,” he told me. “Sometimes I sit on the beach and cry, thinking about where we were and where we are now.”
Now the season is turning. For the families living in tents along the shore, the sea is no longer a place of rest: The sand is windblown and gets into everything, the air is heavy with humidity, and the tents will protect their occupants from the coming cold as little as they did them from the heat that has only just subsided. Still they are patched together against whatever the day might bring. Perhaps looking out at the water will make this bearable—will allow me not to see the tents, if only for a moment, by fixing my eyes on something wider.
Sometimes I ask myself: What if Gaza had no sea? What if it were landlocked? I cannot let myself contemplate the answer.