killed. We are trying our best to repair my launch because there are 26 families that earn a living from it. The closure imposed on us has really affected the economy. Some days we have fish, and other days we don’t. Fishermen have no other profession but fishing, but you can find fishermen’s sons who are very well educated and have university degrees, but they can’t find any other jobs so they end up fishing as well. Nowadays, there is no other way to earn money but from the sea. We used to have citrus fruit farms. During the harvest, two thirds of Gaza used to work on these farms; oranges, lemons, and so on. We used to export outside Gaza, and if you ask old people about it, they will tell you about how they used to work on the citrus farms between June and September, the citrus season. People used to come and buy the fruit on trains. There would be four to five full trainloads every day and every train used to carry between 20 to 50 thousand boxes. We used to have factories that exported everywhere. Huge numbers of people used to work in this sector; on the land, picking, bringing fruits to the factories, others in transportation. Everyone used to work for the farms. After the closure, Israel uprooted the trees; oranges, lemon, and grapefruit, etc. The citrus fruit industry was completely wiped out, and now nothing is left for us except to work out at sea. And yes, of course they [Israeli soldiers] have targeted me, many times. If I manage to find a good area for fishing, they usually tell me, “Leave! Get away from here!”, and I would tell them that I am allowed to fish here but if I protested too much, they would threaten to arrest me and take my boat. We are all in danger here, and we have lost many children. There are three or four children from the Baker family who have been killed because the soldiers shoot randomly.91 They shoot to scare us. However, these random bullets hit people and kill them. I have no other choice but to fish. I don’t know how to make falafel! My launch that they destroyed cost me around $2,000 and I can’t afford to build another one. Since 1984 I have worked on this launch and I used to earn good money but for 10 years, the cruel closure has choked us. I have a son who is 24 years old and I can’t even afford to help him get married. Some fishermen, like the younger fishermen, in months like these they work as taxi drivers. There are Gazan fishermen who left Gaza and went to Sweden 91 Israeli shelling killed four children from the Baker family on Gaza Beach on 16 July 2014. See: Adam Chandler, “Israeli Strike on Gaza Beach Kills Four Children,” The Atlantic, 16 July 2014, available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/07/israeli-strike-on-gaza-beach-kills-fourchildren/374549/ [accessed 12 June 2017]. 32