These fishermen are living in very hard times because of the blockade on Gaza. They go to sea simply to feed their families... The Israeli navy has decreed that they don't have the right to go further out than six miles from the coast. This boundary was never officialised by the international community and the Israeli navy never issued any official decree or announcement with respect to it. In addition,  there is not any official channel of communication open between the Israeli navy and the Palestinian fishermen. All information regarding it is conveyed to the fishermen on an ad hoc basis through the medium of gunfire or the threat of it. In practice, whilst it is true that the Israeli gunboats have a higher tendency to harass or attack the fishermen when they are six miles or more from shore, the Israeli naval aggression is essentially arbitrary and can take place anywhere within Palestinian territorial waters - and regularly occurs within the so-called "six mile limit". The fisherman who was shot in the leg for instance, was at the time only one nautical mile from the shores of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

The problem is, the closer the fisherman are to the coast, the smaller the fish are. The result: they often come back with not even enough to pay for the fuel they used."