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JERUSALEM – 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).
Around 45,500 Palestinians, more than half of them women and children, have been killed since the war began but another 11,000 are missing, the bureau said, citing numbers from the Palestinian Health Ministry.
As such, the population of Gaza has declined by about 160,000 during the course of the war to 2.1 million, with more than a million or 47% of the total children under the age of 18, the PCBS said.
It added that Israel has “raged a brutal aggression against Gaza targeting all kinds of life there; humans, buildings and vital infrastructure… entire families were erased from the civil register. There are catastrophic human and material losses.”
Israel’s foreign ministry said the PCBS data was “fabricated, inflated, and manipulated in order to vilify Israel”.
Israel has faced accusations of genocide in Gaza because of the scale of death and destruction.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nations’ highest legal body, ruled last January that Israel must prevent acts of genocide against Palestinians, while Pope Francis has suggested the global community should study whether Israel’s Gaza campaign constitutes genocide.
The PCBS said some 22% of Gaza’s population currently faces catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity, according to the criteria of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a global monitor.
Included in that 22 percent are some 3,500 children at risk of death due to malnutrition and lack of food, the bureau said.
Meanwhile, tensions in Israel and Palestine escalated dramatically when over 600 Israeli settlers stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem.
According to Wafa news agency, 632 Israeli settlers entered the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound under the protection of Israeli police, engaging in provocative tours of the holy site and performing Talmudic rituals.
The actions, which violate the long-standing status quo permitting only Muslim prayer at the site, were met with condemnation from local sources, who also reported that Israeli police had blocked Palestinians from entering the Old City of occupied East Jerusalem, including access to Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Meanwhile, the Israeli military kept up the pressure on northern Gaza on Wednesday, striking in a suburb of Gaza City, medics said, and told residents in a central part of the enclave to evacuate from an area where fighters were firing rockets.
Air strikes in Shejaia, a suburb of Gaza City, killed at least eight Palestinians, according to local emergency services. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military and it was not immediately clear who was killed in the attack.
In al-Buriej, in central Gaza, the Israeli military said it struck a militant operating in an area from which rockets had been fired into Israel the previous day. Its Arabic spokesman had ordered people to leave the area before the strike.
The Palestinian news agency WAFA said two people had been killed in that strike and 15 more in an airstrike in Jabalia. There was no immediate confirmation from Gaza health officials.
Much of the area around the northern towns of Beit Hanoun, Jabalia and Beit Lahiya has been cleared of people and razed, fuelling speculation, which Israel denies, that it intends to keep the area as a buffer zone after the fighting in Gaza ends.
Meanwhile, The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) says a new UN report detailing Israeli attacks on Gaza’s healthcare system is further proof of “genocide” in the besieged Palestinian territory, Al Jazeera reports.
“Every day, new evidence of the ongoing genocide in Gaza by the far-right Israeli government comes to light,” said CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad in a statement.
“It is time the world community, and the genocide-complicit Biden administration takes concrete action to stop Israel’s slaughter, forced starvation, mass destruction, and ethnic cleansing in Gaza.”
The Palestinian relief agency UNRWA has reiterated its call for a ceasefire in Gaza amid the ongoing conflict which began on Oct, 2023.
In a post on X, UNRWA said, “Ever since the war in Gaza started in 2023, we have been calling for a ceasefire.”
“Throughout 2024, we continued this call,” it said adding, “It’s now 2025, the war goes on, unabated.”