Two years of war and a year of fishing, swimming, and general sea access being outright banned per Israel, and a hardy few surfers with boards and bodies intact enough to surf dare enter the water, per an Associated Press report from earlier this month.

Though a tenuous ceasefire remains, the call to, and blessing of, surf is far too hard to heed for the precious few who’ve clung onto their gear, like Tahseen Abu Assi, a Gaza City surfer who told the AP that even through countless displacements over the past two years of war, he’s had his stick in tow.

“If something happened to it I won’t be able to get another one,” Abu Assi said, explaining to the outlet that not one surfboard has entered the Palestinian territory since 2007.…