GAZA STRIP (Middle East Eye) – Instead of waiting for her fisherman husband to finish his day off the Gaza coast, Mona Hneideq now works alongside him. He catches the fish, while she creates and makes delicious dishes with them.
Along with 19 other women, Hneideq has opened the Fishermen’s Wives Seafood Kitchen, near the seaport of Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip. There, the women support their husbands, whose work in the fishing industry faces ever tighter restrictions from the Zionist regime.
“They go fishing early in the morning, and once they are back, we take the catch and make different dishes based on customers’ orders,” Hneideq, 36, told Middle East Eye as she cleaned the fish.
“We prepare the meals, wrap them, and then deliver them to different districts of the Gaza Strip… We complete our husbands and help them overcome the challenges.”
Hneideq decided to support her husband after 14 years of marriage, during which she witnessed him come close to giving up fishing many times.
“He felt desperate and hopeless on many occasions, and he was about to give up on his profession. He and his fellow fishermen get chased by Israeli gunboats almost every day.
“The occupation [forces] open fire towards them, threaten to detain them, confiscate their boats and limit the fishing zone regularly,” she said.
“This has made fishing sometimes not worth the effort. There are many days when he would come back home after a long day of fishing without earning anything. But there were also days when he would make up for it.”
Before they started the project, the feelings of hopelessness that had overwhelmed Hneideq’s husband meant he thought it would fail.
Although the majority of the 20 women working in the kitchen are wives of fishermen, there are also daughters looking to support their seagoing fathers.
Growing up in a family deeply rooted in the fishing industry, Hanan al-Aqraa learned to make seafood recipes from a very young age.
“I remember when I was a child, I used to come to the seaport where my father worked. I brought him food and tea and watched him fishing for hours,” she told MEE.
The 29-year-old has a degree in English literature. Since her graduation, she has only done work connected to this degree for a couple of months.
The unemployment rate in the blockaded Gaza Strip, which has been described by human rights groups as an “open-air prison”, reached 45 percent at the end of 2022, compared to 13 percent in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS).
Among youth graduates (19-29 years old) holding an intermediate diploma or higher, the unemployment rate in Gaza had reached 74 percent, compared to 29 percent in the West Bank.
The kitchen’s project is supported by a non-governmental organization, the Economic and Social Development Centre of Palestine, as part of an initiative to improve fishermen’s income and support their families.