JISR AL-ZARQA, Israel (AP) – After a year of coronavirus pandemic, the fishermen of an Arab village in central Israel inflicted another blow by a mysterious oil spill in the Mediterranean.
The government is struggling with its worst ecological disaster in years and this week ordered a precautionary ban on the sale of seafood.
Despite the ban, the fishermen of Jisr al-Zarqa went to sea on Thursday to bring in their catch.
Sami Ali, a representative of the fishermen in the town, maintained that it is safe to continue fishing.
‘The tar floats on the sea, on the water, it does not penetrate deep. It damages the reefs, maybe even seaweed, the beach and many facilities. It also damaged our equipment, “he said. “But the fish do not eat things that are not natural.”
Scientists disagree and say it is far too risky to continue fishing while continuing to analyze the disaster.
More than 90% of Israel’s 195 kilometers (120 miles) of Mediterranean coastline were covered with about 1,000 tons of black tar, as a result of an oil spill at sea earlier this month. The pollution swept north to neighboring Lebanon and caused great damage to the ecosystem, endangering seabirds, green sea turtles and other marine life.
The government has not yet identified who it believes is responsible for the spill, and has blocked the publication of details of the investigation, saying it could jeopardize its efforts to bring those responsible to justice. The cleanup is expected to take months.
Authorities have banned people from visiting beaches due to the toxicity of the tar, and the Ministry of Health on Wednesday issued a ban on the sale of all Mediterranean seafood until further notice.
The ministry said that although it had not yet received any evidence indicating a health risk, the ban was intended as a precautionary measure. It is said that fish are being tested to determine the level of pollution, and that it has notified fishermen and fish traders of the ban.
Jisr al-Zarqa, an impoverished Arab village off the coast of Israel south of Haifa, is already feeling the pain of the economic downturn 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 town’s fishermen, about 20 people, went to sea on Thursday to bring in the morning catch despite the ban.
Although Ali is not worried about the pollution of the fish, he is worried about the strong sales that deepened the community’s financial battle this week.
“We could not sell much. “Some of it we ate with our families,” Ali said.
Thousands of volunteers took up the task of cleaning up the poisonous tar off Israel’s coast. But every day the sea makes up fresh varieties.
“Nobody knows how much tar there is, on the bottom of the sea or in other places,” said Arik Rosenblum, director of EcoOcean, the organization that led the volunteer efforts.
Together with government authorities, EcoOcean has launched instruments in the 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 it is estimated to be enormous, said Noa Shenkar, a marine biologist at Tel Aviv University Zoology School.
“We have a very good database of what it was like before the oil spill,” she told the Associated Press. “But we’ve learned from oil spills in other parts of the world that the damage to biodiversity is usually very important, and you can see the impact for years.”
The Ministry of Environmental Protection says it has not received any prior warning about the oil spill from international agencies, and that it is doing its utmost to combat the disaster. Environmental groups and scientists in Israel have complained that the ministry was slow to act to prevent the petroleum from reaching Israel’s coastline.
For fishermen like those in Jisr al-Zarqa, the effects of the oil spill will be long-term.
“We have suffered the heaviest and most immediate blow,” Ali said, complaining that polluting industries such as gas drilling abroad had gained ‘legitimacy in the maritime landscape’.
“For us, the sea is not just a source of income, it is our heritage,” he said.