When politicians speak of Gaza in the abstract — as a “security problem,” a “humanitarian crisis,” a “conflict zone” — they are, whether they acknowledge it or not, speaking about one of the most densely populated territories on earth, inhabited overwhelmingly by refugees, and populated by a majority of children. The numbers are not background detail. They are the story.
A Territory Smaller Than Many Cities
The Gaza Strip covers approximately 365 square kilometres — roughly the size of Detroit, or slightly larger than the Isle of Man. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), the population of Gaza reached an estimated 2.3 million people by the mid-2020s, yielding a population density of roughly 6,300 people per square kilometre across the Strip as a whole.
That average, stark as it is, understates the reality in Gaza’s most congested areas. Gaza City and the Jabaliya refugee camp in the north, and Khan Younis and Rafah in the south, compress tens of thousands of people into neighbourhoods where apartment blocks rise on narrow plots and families regularly span three or four generations under one roof. Jabaliya, one of eight UNRWA-administered refugee camps in Gaza, is among the most densely populated places on the planet by any standard measure.
For comparison: Bangladesh, often cited as the world’s most densely populated large country, holds approximately 1,300 people per square kilometre. Gaza’s overall density is nearly five times that figure. Within the camps, the density is higher still.
Refugees Twice Over: The 1948 Origin of Gaza’s Population
Gaza’s demographic character cannot be understood without 1948. Before Israel’s establishment, the Gaza Strip itself was a relatively small district. What transformed it was the Nakba — the mass displacement of approximately 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, documented extensively by Israeli historian Benny Morris in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004) and by Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020).
Refugees flooded into the narrow coastal strip from towns and villages across what became southern Israel: from Beersheba, Majdal (present-day Ashkelon), Isdud (Ashdod), and dozens of depopulated villages in between. UNRWA, established by UN General Assembly Resolution 302 (IV) in 1949 specifically to support Palestinian refugees, registered those displaced persons and their descendants. Today, UNRWA figures indicate that approximately 1.6 million of Gaza’s residents — around 70 percent of the population — are registered refugees from 1948 and their descendants.
This is not a historical footnote. It is the living demographic fact of the Strip. The people of Gaza did not simply arrive there or choose it. The majority were driven into it, and then — once Israel imposed its blockade in 2007, tightened progressively over subsequent years — sealed within it. They are, as scholars including Khalidi and Nur Masalha have described, refugees who became prisoners: displaced from one place, confined in another.
The right of return for Palestinian refugees is enshrined in UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III), adopted in December 1948, which affirms that refugees “wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so.” Seventy-six years on, that resolution remains unimplemented for Gaza’s majority population.
The Youngest Population: What the Age Structure Reveals
Gaza’s population is extraordinarily young. According to PCBS data, approximately 50 percent of Gaza’s population is under the age of 18. The median age in Gaza has been estimated at around 18 years — compared with a median age of approximately 30 across the broader Middle East and North Africa region, and 38 in the United States.
This youth bulge is a product of high historical fertility rates combined with the relatively recent compression of a large refugee population into a confined space. UNICEF has repeatedly described Gaza as one of the youngest populations in the world. In practical terms, it means that when any military operation, any embargo on food or medicine, any restriction on electricity strikes Gaza, it strikes a place where every other person you would encounter on the street is a child.
That child, statistically, was born after the blockade began. They have never left Gaza. They have experienced multiple major military escalations — 2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2021 — as formative events of their short lives. Save the Children and UNICEF documented, in the years before the current war, chronic rates of child malnutrition, stunting, and psychological trauma that placed Gaza among the most acutely distressed child populations monitored by any international agency.
What Density Means Under Blockade
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has documented the blockade’s systematic effects across every dimension of life in Gaza: restrictions on the movement of people and goods, caps on imports, the exclusion of materials deemed “dual use,” the closure of the single commercial crossing for extended periods. UNCTAD, in its 2023 report on the Palestinian economy, described Gaza’s economy as one in “de-development” — not merely failing to grow, but actively regressing.
Density interacts with blockade in compounding ways. Contaminated water — the WHO reported that over 95 percent of Gaza’s groundwater was unfit for human consumption even before the current war — spreads waterborne disease faster in high-density environments. Power cuts, which OCHA documented at between 12 and 20 hours per day in the years preceding October 2023, disable water pumps, sewage treatment, and hospital equipment simultaneously across an area too small to have geographic buffers. When a bomb falls in Jabaliya, it falls in one of the most crowded places in the world.
Gisha, the Israeli legal centre for freedom of movement, has meticulously documented how the blockade restricts not only goods but people — preventing patients from accessing specialist medical care, students from attending universities abroad, workers from reaching jobs. The restrictions apply to a population that, in its majority, already holds refugee status and, in its majority, has not yet reached adulthood.
A Population That Must Be Named
Gaza’s 2.3 million people are not an abstraction. They are, in documented demographic fact: a refugee population, mostly descendants of those expelled from their homes in 1948; one of the youngest populations on earth, with half under the age of 18; and among the most densely confined communities in the world, sealed by a blockade now in its second decade. The siege does not act on a generic civilian population. It acts on a population of refugees — displaced once in 1948, enclosed again in 2007 — who have never been permitted to leave, and never permitted to return.
Sources
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), Population Estimates, various years — pcbs.gov.ps
- UNRWA, Where We Work: Gaza Strip — unrwa.org
- UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III), 11 December 1948
- UN General Assembly Resolution 302 (IV), 8 December 1949
- OCHA oPt, Humanitarian Situation Reports — ochaopt.org
- UNCTAD, Report on UNCTAD Assistance to the Palestinian People, 2023
- WHO, Water, Sanitation and Hygiene in the Gaza Strip, published assessments
- UNICEF, State of Palestine: Situation Reports — unicef.org/sop
- Gisha – Legal Centre for Freedom of Movement, Reports on Gaza Closure — gisha.org
- Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (Metropolitan Books, 2020)
- Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge University Press, 2004)
