AAP FACTCHECK – Social media posts are falsely claiming demographic data shows Gaza’s population has grown since October 7, 2023, despite tens of thousands of Palestinians being killed in the Isreal-Hamas war.
The figure being widely shared online is a population growth projection for Gaza calculated in August 2023, and it does not account for population changes since then.
A Facebook post making the claim features a bar chart comparing population changes during historic genocides.
“Gaza population increased by 2.02% or 43,000 people since October 7th 2023. All historical genocides had population decreases of 25% or more. Source: The World factbook,” the caption said.
The first instance of the claim appears to be a November 19 X post from Visegrad 24, a Polish news aggregator whose claims have previously been debunked.
Many posts pointed to The World Factbook, a reference resource produced by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with information and statistics about the world’s countries.
On its Gaza Strip page, it estimates the 2024 population growth rate – the annual rate of change in population size – at 2.02 per cent.
The CIA sourced the figures from the US Census Bureau’s International Population Estimates and Projections.
In August 2023, the Bureau released population estimates and other demographic data up to 2100 for 40 countries and areas in its International Database (IDB).
The projected annual population growth rate for the Gaza Strip was 2.02 per cent.
The Census Bureau confirmed the CIA World Factbook used data from its IDB update in August 2023, before the conflict began.
It does not consider any data after that time.
In October 2023, Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1200 people and taking 251 hostages back to Gaza, according to Israeli authorities.
Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza has killed more than 44,000 people, according to Palestinian authorities.
The Red Cross estimated that 6400 people were missing in the enclave as of July 2024, The Guardian reported.
About 1.9 million people were internally displaced and Gaza’s population was facing disease outbreaks and “catastrophic” food insecurity in October 2024, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, an initiative involving governments, the UN, NGOs and civil society groups.
About 87 per cent of residential homes in the territory had been damaged or destroyed as of November 26, 2024, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.
In July 2024, the UN estimated that the Gaza Strip’s population was 2.1 million, down from the 2.3 million initially projected for 2024 by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS).
The UN figure was calculated after consultations with partner organisations and accounted for an estimated 110,000 Palestinians who had exited Gaza through Egypt.
In July 2024, the PCBS revised its estimated population growth rate for Gaza from “about 2.7 per cent for 2023, to only about 1 per cent during 2024”.
The bureau predicted significant decreases in mortality and birth rates due to “couples’ tendency not to have children as a result of the recent conditions” and a decline in the number of marriages.
The Verdict
False – The claim is inaccurate.
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