JISR AL-ZARQA, Israel (AP) – After enduring a year of the coronavirus pandemic, the fishermen of an Arab village in central Israel have been hit again by a mysterious oil spill in the Mediterranean.
The government struggled with the worst ecological disaster in years and this week banned the sale of seafood as a precaution.
Despite the ban, the fishermen of Jisr al-Zarqa went to sea on Thursday to land their catch.
Sami Ali, a representative of the village fishermen, insisted it was safe to continue fishing.
“The tar floats on the sea, on the water, it does not penetrate deeply. It damages the reefs, maybe also seaweed, the beach and many facilities. It has also damaged our equipment, ”he said. “But the fish don’t eat things that aren’t natural.”
Scientists disagree, saying it is far too risky to keep fishing while continuing to analyze the disaster.
More than 90% of Israel’s 195km Mediterranean coastline was covered with an estimated 1,000 tons of black tar, the result of an oil spill at sea earlier this month. The pollution has migrated north to neighboring Lebanon and has wreaked havoc on the ecosystem, killing seabirds, endangered green sea turtles and other marine life.
The government has not yet determined who it believes is responsible for the spill and has blocked publication of the details of the investigation, as it could jeopardize its efforts to bring those responsible to justice. The cleaning is expected to take months.
Authorities have banned people from visiting beaches due to the tar’s toxicity, and on Wednesday the Ministry of Health issued a ban on the sale of all Mediterranean seafood until further notice.
The ministry said that while it had not yet received any evidence indicating a health risk, the ban was intended as a precautionary measure. It said fish were being tested to determine pollution levels, and it had notified fishermen and fishmongers of the ban.
Jisr al-Zarqa, an impoverished Arab village on the Israeli coast south of Haifa, is already feeling the pain of the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic. The community is one of the poorest in Israel and has long protested what it sees as discriminatory treatment by the Israeli government. Only half of the fishermen in the village, about 20 people, went out to sea on Thursday to bring in the morning catch despite the ban.
Ali isn’t concerned about the pollution of the fish from pollution, but he is concerned about how declining sales this week have deepened the community’s financial troubles.
“We have not been able to sell much. We ate some of it with our families, ”Ali said.
Thousands of volunteers have taken on the task of cleaning the poisonous tar off the coast of Israel. But every day the sea blows up new parties.
“No one knows how much tar there is, at the bottom of the sea or elsewhere,” said Arik Rosenblum, director of EcoOcean, the organization leading the volunteer efforts.
Together with government agencies, EcoOcean has launched instruments at sea that can detect the presence of oil and give researchers a better picture.
The impact of the oil spill on the coastal ecosystem has yet to be fully assessed, but is estimated to be huge, said Noa Shenkar, a marine biologist at Tel Aviv University’s School of Zoology.
“We have a very solid database of what it was like before the oil spill,” she told The Associated Press. “But we have learned from oil spills elsewhere in the world that the damage to biodiversity is usually very great, and that has been visible for years.”
The Department of Environmental Protection says it has received no prior warning from international agencies about the oil spill and is doing its utmost to deal with the disaster. Environmental groups and scientists in Israel have accused the ministry of slow action to stop the petroleum from reaching Israel’s coastline.
For fishermen like those in Yisr al-Zarqa, the oil spill will have long-term consequences.
“We’ve been hit the hardest and most direct,” Ali said, lamenting that polluting industries such as offshore gas platforms have “gained legitimacy in the seascape”.
“For us, the sea is not only a source of income, it is our heritage,” he said.