State of Palestine

Note dei ricercatori

Marine context: Palestine's only sea coast is the Gaza Strip (Mediterranean). The West Bank is landlocked; the Dead Sea is hypersaline and contains no fish, so there is no freshwater/lake spearfishing there. CONFIDENCE is LOW because no Palestinian source could be retrieved that regulates recreational spearfishing as a distinct activity, and the verbatim provisions cited are: (1) the Mandate-era Fisheries Ordinance No. 6 of 1937 (Section 5 explosives/poison ban; Section 3 licence requirement), which the Leiden Journal analysis and FAO record confirm is treated as the fisheries legislation in force in Gaza, and (2) Oslo II Annex I Article XIV (1995) governing the Gaza maritime zone. IMPORTANT CAVEAT on law_texts source: the FAOLEX file isr1688.pdf is a consolidated edition in which the original Mandate ordinance's territorial references to 'Palestine' have been editorially replaced with 'Israel' and Israeli ministry/Knesset references inserted by later amendment; the substance of s.5 (explosives/poison) and the s.3 licensing requirement is original to the 1937 ordinance. The separate FAOLEX 'Fisheries Rules' (isr020039E.pdf), which contains the speargun provisions (banning spearguns only in Lake Kinneret and the Gulf of Eilat) and underwater-fishing restrictions, was reviewed but is the modern ISRAELI administrative regulation (it references Lake Kinneret, Gulf of Eilat and Haifa Bay - all Israeli territory) and was therefore NOT cited as Palestinian law to avoid misattribution. Spearfishing is documented as actually practised in Gaza by ~250 subsistence free-divers using home-made spearguns; no source indicates it is specifically prohibited under Palestinian law, but actual sea access is heavily restricted or banned by the Israeli authorities controlling Gaza's waters (e.g. the 18 January 2025 'no-go zone'). No closed seasons, catch limits, size limits, protected-species lists or designated spearfishing zones could be confirmed from authoritative Palestinian sources; these are left empty/unknown rather than fabricated. 2026-06-22 deepening (still LOW confidence - no spearfishing-specific Palestinian statute exists): added two sourced provisions - (1) the July 2025 Israeli military (IDF / Lt. Col. Avichay Adraee) public ban on entering the sea along the entire Gaza coast, whose verbatim wording expressly names 'fishermen, swimmers and divers', i.e. it directly reaches diving/spearfishing (sourced to Ynetnews, corroborated by The National, which also records the ~700 m wartime access limit); and (2) the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture (Department of Fisheries) ban/confiscation of fishing nets with mesh openings under 10 mm, attributed to Director General of Fisheries Adel Attallah and tied to Palestinian fishing legislation of 1937-1946 (sourced verbatim in Arabic to al-Resalah). These confirm the picture: the only active Palestinian fishing-method regulation found is the net-mesh rule (gear, not spearguns), while the decisive constraint on any diving/spearfishing remains the Israeli-controlled sea-access regime, now an explicit divers-named total ban. CONFIDENCE remains LOW because still no Palestinian source regulates recreational spearfishing/spearguns as such; the new items are a method rule and an external access ban, not a domestic spearfishing statute.