'The ebb, the tide, the sighs' By Gideon Levy

The young fisherman is now in hospital, feeble and pale, one leg in a cast held in place by iron screws. He is awash with pain. His mother does not leave his bedside. A blind Palestinian physician takes him for a brief physiotherapy session in the corridor. Mohammed Masalah leans on a walker. The blind orthopedist encourages him to take one step and then another, but the pain defeats him and he asks to be taken back to bed.

The sea is the same sea and the Arabs are the same Arabs, as an Israeli prime minister once said. Only the cease-fire is no longer the same cease-fire. On land and in the air it is generally maintained, but not at sea. There, Israeli forces continue to shoot at fishermen from besieged Gaza, who are trying to wrest from the sea a living that is so difficult to make on land.

Mohammed Masalah is a 19-year-old twelfth-grader, the son of a fisherman from the Tel al-Sultan neighborhood of Rafah. His father no longer goes out to sea. Mohammed does most of his studying at home, and three or four times a week goes to fish at night. Since the age of 16, he has been getting his schooling in the morning and fishing at night. He has about 700 fish hooks that he throws into the water, hoping for the best. Now is the season of the groupers and red snapper, known in Gaza as farfur. On a very good night he catches 15 kilograms of fish, two kilograms on a bad night, and there are also nights with nothing. Fish go for NIS 50 per kilo in an abundant season, double that when there are no fish. He splits the earnings with his companion. Their GPS tells them where to stop: 1,800 meters from the shore, no more......