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An X account of visegrad24 made a post citing The World Factbook claiming that

Gaza population increased by 2.02% or 43,000 people since October 7th 2023.

(an archived version if the site doesn't work). AAP Factcheck later refuted this claim:

False. The figure is a projection that was calculated in August 2023 and doesn’t take the war into account.

It said the figure is based on a projection from the US Census Bureau’s International Population Estimates and Projections. It cites the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) which revised the claim to a 1% population increase. It links to this PDF, which does not load for me, but the archived version does.

I then decided to look for another source, and I found on the World Population Review

Gaza has grown by 22,449 in the last year, which represents a 2.88% annual change.

I finally continued to a Times of Israel article where they claim

The population of Gaza has fallen 6 percent since the war with Israel began nearly 15 months ago as about 100,000 Palestinians left the enclave, while more than 55,000 are presumed dead, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), citing Hamas figures.

Which sources are more reliable and what can be concluded regarding if the population in Gaza since October 7th 2023 or since January 1st 2024 until December 31st 2024 has increased or decreased?

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    Maybe the best conclusion is: It's a war zone, nobody did an exact census, therefore nobody knows exactly. Note that the population in Gaza is extremely young and before the war it had one of the highest natural population growth rates (meaning without immigration and emigration) in the world. Commented Jan 2 at 8:06
  • That could be the case, but I'm seeing figures such as +2.88%, +1%, -6% and some more that I didn't add to the post. In all 3 cases the articles source PCBS (some with links to the exact publications, and other without). Commented Jan 2 at 9:53
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    Your link to the World Population review, also clearly says that the 2024 figures are estimates and projections. They are not a census. It probably isn't even possible to conduct a census. Commented Jan 2 at 10:50
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    The World Population Review link you posted cites a single source for its data, which is titled "Localities in Gaza Governorate by type of locality and population estimates - 2007-2016". So, clearly, they are just taking the numbers from 2007–2016 and extrapolating them. Which would work well if nothing significant happened between 2016 and now … but that's obviously not the case. Commented Jan 2 at 17:28
  • Is this a skeptical question, or just a question about Gaza's population, when there are conflicting sources? I would have thought a skeptical question would be more like "This source from October 2024 claims that Gaza's population has increased since 2023, despite the recent events." Commented Jan 2 at 18:59

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While reliable sources are difficult to find, due to the ongoing war, the assertion that the population of Gaza increased since the Hamas attacks against Israel and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza is highly implausible based on the sources available.

First, what have been the negative contributions to the population of Gaza since then?

Deaths: The United Nations reported around 45,000 people killed as of December of 2024, basing its figures on data from the Gaza Ministry of Health in that same month. While the Ministry of Health is not an independent source, seeing as it is a government organization in an administration led by Hamas, its numbers have nonetheless been seen as credible by many independent international sources. Furthermore, these numbers are roughly in line with what the Israeli government asserts; for instance, in May 2024, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that about 30,000 people had been killed in Gaza, not too far from the figure from the Ministry of Health at that time (35,000). Where they disagree, of course, is in the percentage of people killed who were Hamas soldiers, but since the question is about population growth, not civilian casualities, this distinction is not terribly pertinent to answering it. It is also reasonable to speculate that these figures are an underestimate, given the difficulty of confirming deaths and the likelihood of additional deaths due to secondary effects of the conflict, but for the sake of making a conservative estimate, we will limit ourselves to these numbers.

Emigration: News reports suggest at least 100,000 Gazans sought refuge in Egypt before Israel took control of the Rafah border crossing.

What about positive contributions to the population?

Births: The CIA Factbook suggests a population of around 2 million and a growth rate of around 2.13% in years before the war. However, note that this includes deaths, immigration, and emigration. Correcting for those rates, given in the same source, provides a birth rate of around 2.14%, or around 43,000 births per year.

Immigration: While I cannot find any statistics, I think the extent of immigration to Gaza since the beginning of the war can be approximated as zero. Net immigration was already negative before, due to strict control by Israel and Egypt of the only egresses and Gaza in general not being a place with many opportunities. With the war making it even less popular and Israel having taken control of all crossings as of May 2024, it seems likely that essentially no one is permanently moving to Gaza.

In short, based on publicly available information, the negative contributions to the population of Gaza since the beginning of the war are likely to exceed 145,000, while the positive contributions are likely around 43,000. This is without considering deaths that likely occurred due to the widespread disruption of basic societal services, but may not have been counted in Gazan or Israeli figures as due to the war.

Given these sources, it is highly unlikely that the population of Gaza has increased at all, and much more likely that it has decreased substantially.

As far as why the sources provided in the question differ....

  • As the fact check correctly noted, the World Factbook data is simply a projection. It does not account for recent events.
  • The World Population Review data, besides being for only a subset of Gaza, as mentioned, is similarly a projection. The site also notes that its data "come from the latest revision of the UN World Urbanization Prospects," which as far as I can tell, was in 2018, making everything after that point an extrapolation, and obviously not accounting for subsequent wars. You can safely take this source as the least reliable for recent population data.
  • The revised estimate of 1%...well, the framing in that source as much polemic as statistical (counting "martyrs," for instance), but as far as I can tell, it is not accounting for emigration whatsoever, when, as mentioned, around 100,000 Gazans seem to have been able to emigrate to Egypt before most routes of escape were entirely closed off. If we bear in mind that (a) it was a bit behind on casualties, giving 39,000 people killed, and (b) it had a higher initial estimated population growth rate of 2.7%, we can see that they would end up with a net increase of 19,000 out of about 2 million, giving their 1% number. However, this number is still too high, since it accounts neither for the high death toll by the end of 2024 (which would lower the estimate to around 0.3%), nor, most importantly, the mass emigration (which would give around -5%). This could either be because this mostly occurred in 2023 and this is meant to be a 2024 estimate, or because the source has political reasons to not mention anyone as fleeing.
  • The Times of Israel article uses reliable sources similar to those that I mentioned, and is likely the closest to accurate.
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    There's a lot of original research and home-made calculations here. Commented Jan 6 at 4:35
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    @pipe - I've never liked the policy of this site that discourages any kind of critical thinking. It's not really in the spirit of scientific skepticism. I provided sources, assessed their reliability, and assumed that my audience is capable of understanding addition and subtraction. I would say to vote on the answer as you see fit, but, well, it looks as if you got ahead of me. Commented Jan 6 at 4:36
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    43000 births per year seems to be an underestimate. There were 58270 in the Gaza Strip in 2021 according to PA'sinterior ministry : pcbs.gov.ps/… In the first 3 months of the war, nearly 20,000 babies have been born in Gaza according to Unicef : timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/… (it might be slightly more than usual due to a higher rate of preterm births en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…). Commented Jan 6 at 10:01
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    @Evargalo - I think you're putting too much stock in that single source. Plenty of other sources show net emigration from Gaza that year, including the one that I cited, which fits better with a poor region, not a popular immigration target, whose borders were almost entirely controlled by Egypt and Israel during that period. More likely, the projection simply overestimated births relative to what the organization ultimately recorded. Commented Jan 6 at 10:20
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    @Evargalo - Is it simply counting administrative registrations? Did the PCBS actually have access to all administrative registrations of births in Gaza before the war? It appears to be a state institution based out of the West Bank, so under an administration often at odds with Hamas and vice versa, and also to have been subject to Israeli interference in terms of collecting data (and Israel is between it and Gaza). Commented Jan 6 at 10:34
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The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported on the Palestinian population in July 2024.

They reported

5.61 million Palestinians in the State of Palestine (2.85 million males and 2.76 million females)

They report on 39 thousand Palestinians killed, several thousand that left, and people at risk of malnutrition and lack of medical treatment.

They predict:

Based on the data, the estimated growth rate in Gaza Strip for 2023 will decrease from about 2.7%, according to PCBS estimates for 2023, to only about 1% during 2024. After mid-2024, mortality and birth rates will decrease very significantly as a result of couples’ tendency not to have children as a result of the recent conditions, and out of fear for the health of mothers and children, in addition to the decrease in the number of new marriages after and during the Israeli occupation aggression, which reached very low levels.

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  • I performed a major rewrite of this answer, based on the same reference. Original answer didn't explain how this reference addressed the question, and was focussed on claimed changes in different versions of the document. Commented Feb 15 at 12:17

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