JISR AL-ZARQA, Israel (AP) – After resisting a year of a coronavirus pandemic, fishermen in an Arab village in central Israel suffered another blow for a mysterious oil spill in the Mediterranean.
Struggling with its worst ecological disaster in years, the government this week ordered a preventive ban on the sale of seafood.
Despite the ban, fishermen from Jisr al-Zarqa went overboard on Thursday to bring their catch.
Sami Ali, a representative of the village’s fishermen, insisted that it is safe to continue fishing.
“The tar floats in the sea, in the water, does not penetrate deep. It damages the reefs, perhaps also the algae, the beach and many facilities. It also damaged our equipment, ”he said. “But fish don’t eat things that are not natural.”
Scientists disagree and say that it is too risky to continue fishing while analyzing the disaster.
More than 90% of Israel’s 195-kilometer (120-mile) Mediterranean coast was covered by about 1,000 tonnes of black tar, the result of an oil spill at sea earlier this month. Pollution has spread to the north, to neighboring Lebanon, and has caused major damage to the ecosystem, killing seabirds, endangered green turtles and other forms of marine life.
The government has not yet identified who it believes is responsible for the spill and has blocked publication of details of the investigation, saying it could hamper its efforts to bring those responsible to justice. Cleaning should take months.
Authorities forbade people to visit the beaches because of the toxicity of the tar, and on Wednesday, the Ministry of Health banned the sale of all Mediterranean seafood until further notice.
The ministry said that while it has not yet received evidence to indicate a health risk, the ban was considered a precautionary measure. He said the fish were being tested to determine the level of pollution and that he had notified fishermen and fishmongers about the ban.
Jisr al-Zarqa, an impoverished Arab village on the Israeli coast south of Haifa, is already feeling the pain of the economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. The community is one of Israel’s poorest and has long protested what it considers discriminatory treatment by the Israeli government. Only half of the village’s fishermen, about 20 people, went overboard on Thursday to bring the morning fish, despite the ban.
Although Ali is not concerned about the contamination of fish by pollution, he is concerned about the drop in sales this week, deepening the financial difficulties of the community.
“We were unable to sell much. Some of them we eat with our families, “said Ali.
Thousands of volunteers took on the task of cleaning up the poisonous tar off the coast of Israel. But every day the sea raises new lots.
“Nobody knows how much tar is out there, under the sea or elsewhere,” said Arik Rosenblum, director of EcoOcean, the organization that leads voluntary efforts.
Together with government officials, EcoOcean 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 not yet been fully assessed, but it is estimated to be huge, said Noa Shenkar, a marine biologist at the Tel Aviv University zoology school.
“We have a very solid database of what it was like before the oil spill,” she told the Associated Press. “But we learned from oil spills elsewhere in the world that damage to biodiversity is often very significant, and for several years you can see the impact.”
The Ministry of Environmental Protection says it has not received any prior notice from international agencies about the oil spill and is doing its best to deal with the disaster. Environmental groups and scientists in Israel have accused the ministry of taking too long to prevent oil from reaching the coast of Israel.
For fishermen like those in Jisr al-Zarqa, the impact of the oil spill will be long-term.
“We suffered the heaviest and most immediate blow,” said Ali, while complaining that polluting industries, such as offshore gas platforms, were given “legitimacy in the maritime landscape”.
“For us, the sea is not just a source of income, it is our heritage,” he said.