Palestinian officials have estimated that Gaza’s population has plunged by 6 percent in the past 15 months as a result of Israel’s genocide, with over 200,000 people having fled the territory or been killed or injured by Israeli forces.
In a report released this week by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), officials say that the Gaza population is now estimated to be 2.1 million, down at least 160,000 people from the pre-October 7, 2023, population count.
The official death toll is currently over 45,000 people, including 17,500 children. PCBS estimates that there are 11,000 Palestinians missing and presumed dead, while at least 100,000 have fled the besieged region. Israeli attacks have injured another 107,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza officials’ counts.
The decline in population, amounting to nearly a full percentage decrease once every 10 weeks on average, is a horrific show of Israel’s genocidal brutality — which has also encompassed the destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure, economy and prospects for the future.
Further, experts have long said that these estimates are extremely conservative, with officials often unable to account for all of the dead from an attack and relying solely on deaths from strikes reported by hospitals. Other deaths, like those to famine and disease, are largely excluded from the death toll.
But experts have warned that deaths from causes like starvation could majorly overshadow those from Israeli strikes and gunfire. Doctors who have served in Gaza have estimated that the true death toll is at least 119,000, if not over 300,000; using the same method as the estimate of direct and indirect deaths calculated by researchers in a landmark commentary in The Lancet, the true toll could now be well over 225,000 people.
The estimated number of people missing and presumed dead under the rubble has also remained largely unchanged for nearly 10 months now, even as Israel has continued bombing and destroying buildings; the Israeli military has even blocked rescue missions from entering northern Gaza to search for survivors under the rubble amid its current ethnic cleansing campaign there.
“Cities became rubble and bombs branded the houses, walls, memory and pages of history with destruction, as entire neighborhoods became history, entire families were erased from the civil register. There are catastrophic human and material losses, yet this aggressive, brutal Israeli aggression against all of Gaza Strip continues,” PCBS wrote in its report.
There is a growing international consensus among experts and humanitarian groups that Israel is committing genocide or, at least, genocidal acts in Gaza.
Last month, Amnesty International found in a sprawling report that Israel’s assault has violated at least three of the five acts prohibited in the Genocide Convention, including killing members of the group, causing physical and mental harm to the group, and deliberately inflicting conditions brought about to harm the group. The group said that Israeli officials have displayed clear intent to commit genocide throughout the assault.
Meanwhile, two other major human rights groups also found last month that Israel has been committing acts of genocide in Gaza. Human Rights Watch said that Israel’s deprivation of water to Gaza is an act of genocide, while Médecins Sans Frontières highlighted Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health care system.
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