Despite fatal attack, beachgoers continue to provoke sharks near Hadera power station
Days after diver was mauled to death, visitors again seeking contact with the predators, with little enforcement to be found
Sue Surkes is The Times of Israel's environment reporter
Four days after a fatal shark attack off the coast of Hadera, and three days after police said the beach had been closed, it looked like business as usual over the weekend, as curious shark-spotters lined the shore and the shallows amid an influx of the marine predators.
Around 2:30 p.m. on Friday, some visitors could be seen wading in up to their thighs to throw dead fish at the creatures to bring them closer. Not a single police officer or patrol car was in sight.
A man from the central town of Taybe who identified himself as Sergio got within a few meters of a shark by throwing a dead fish toward it. “Did you see when I threw him the dead fish and he ate it?” he ecstatically asked this reporter, who splashed into the sea fully clothed (but at a safe distance from the sharks) for the sake of on-the-spot reporting.
Sergio, at the beach with his wife and small child, said he had not seen any patrols since his family had arrived at 11 a.m.
“I’m not scared,” said Liav from nearby Givat Olga, a suburb of Hadera, as he exited the sea after joining the group of men throwing dead fish. “It’s fun!”
Fuad from Fureidis also said he wasn’t frightened, explaining that he comes from a family of fishermen and that he had not swum out into deep water as had 45-year-old diver Barak Tzach, a father of four from Petah Tikva who was mauled to death by one shark or more on Monday.
An Orthodox teen who had come down with a group from a nearby yeshiva would not give his name but explained that he’d been with the fish throwers because he “loves nature.”
Some of those with whom The Times of Israel spoke had seen a viral video clip of an interview broadcast Tuesday on Channel 12, in which police spokesman Aryeh Doron insisted that the beach was closed as onlookers wandered around behind him.
At 3 p.m., a Hadera city patrol car arrived. The patrolman chided one of the fish throwers before returning to his car. At 4 p.m., four police officers arrived, but by then nobody was in the water.
Both the police and the Israel Nature and Parks Authority (INPA) said the beach was the territorial and enforcement responsibility of the local Hadera authority. Neither the Hadera Municipality nor the Israel Electric Corporation responded to queries by press time.
The shark attack — the first reported fatal incident of this sort off Israel’s Mediterranean Coast since 1946 — took place on Monday close to where the Hadera Stream drains into the sea.
Dusky and sandbar sharks have gathered in the waters warmed by the Orot Rabin Power Station — operated by the Israel Electric Corporation — for years, from November to May, providing a spectacle for the public, and many visitors have entered the water to try to interact with the animals.
The cause of the shark attack is not clear, but may have been the result of multiple factors.
The sharks were drawn to the mouth of the stream by a sudden heating of the stream’s water. The temperature rise, which caused a sudden drop in oxygen, resulted in a mass fish die-off, offering a feast for the sharks as the dead fish washed into the sea.
איך אפשר לבוא לצוללן ז״ל בטענות אחרי שכל הרשת מוצפת סרטונים של אנשים מלטפים כרישים בחוף? pic.twitter.com/nnoK0OjY3N
— עמוס גרוס – מחזיר עוקב ???????????? (@e82340) April 21, 2025
As the predators tried to get at the fish, onlookers teased them, pulled on their tails, and even reportedly hit them in some cases to get good pictures, as shown in video clips on social media. Some parents even allowed their young children to get close to the sharks to film them.
Education, fences, or fines?
Shark expert Adi Barash, who runs the Sharks in Israel organization while studying for a postdoctorate at Tel Aviv University’s Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, noted that the INPA issues warnings annually against entering the sea where the sharks congregate.
She said Sharks in Israel educates children in schools, and mans information booths on the lawns of the Hadera Stream Park on Saturdays, when the weather is clement, and over five days of the Passover holiday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. It also conducted tours on the beach, enabling families to learn about and enjoy the sharks without approaching them.
Barash said the quantities of dead fish this year were out of the ordinary and that public behavior had deteriorated to new lows.
Sharks and humans had gotten more used to one another over the years, and more emboldened, she went on.
“I’m scared every April that something might happen,” she said. “There are fish that die, drawing the sharks into the shallow waters, and that’s when people start going out [after winter]. Everyone’s in the shallow water.”
There had been some reports of the usually patient sharks nipping at flippers and showing irritation, she went on, but the attack on the diver was “very extreme and not what we expected.”
“This is [the sharks’] time to eat before they go wandering,” she explained. “They are always less patient in April. They need to eat because they need to leave. And there we are, stuck between them. We pull their tails and sit on them and block them and do all the things you don’t do with wild animals. This behavior used to be more marginal. This year it became a sport.”
Given the widespread Israeli practice of swimming in unauthorized beaches without lifeguards, like the one in Hadera, despite warnings against doing so, Barash called for a specific law banning human entry into the shark waters off the Hadera coast, along with increased enforcement.
She added that because sharks were fish and fish in general are defined as a marine “resource” for human use, they were legally defined as “protected natural assets” rather than wild animals. It was illegal to touch or catch the former. In the case of the latter, it was only against the law to kill or destroy them, and even then, the harm had to be proven in court.
Youval Arbel, deputy CEO of the marine environmental organization Zalul, said fences were useless and that the best way to stop people from harassing the sharks was to slap a NIS 2,000 ($550) fine on anyone who put a foot into the water.
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