Population has declined by about 160,000 since Israel’s assault on Gaza began, official Palestinian statistics agency says.
The population of Gaza has fallen 6 percent since Israel’s devastating assault on the besieged Palestinian territory began nearly 15 months ago, according to the official Palestinian statistics agency.
About 100,000 Palestinians have left the enclave while more than 55,000 are presumed to have lost their lives, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) said in a release on Tuesday.
Approximately 45,500 Palestinians, more than half of them women and children, have been killed since the war began and 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 percent of the total remaining population, children under the age of 18, the PCBS said.
It said 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”.
Leading rights groups have accused Israel of carrying out acts of genocide in its war on Gaza, citing the vast scale of death and destruction and the denial of the delivery of essential services, including humanitarian aid.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nations’s highest legal body, ruled last January that Israel must prevent acts of genocide against Palestinians, while Roman Catholic Pope Francis has suggested the global community should study whether Israel’s Gaza campaign constitutes genocide.
Israel has repeatedly rejected the accusations, claiming it abides by international law and has a right to defend itself against Hamas.
Israeli forces have continued to seal shut vital border crossings in Gaza, preventing the entry of desperately needed aid, including food and medicine.
In the north of the Strip, an even tighter siege has been imposed since Israel’s army launched a renewed ground offensive there in October. Residents there are trapped, facing a looming famine, and are enduring relentless Israeli bombardment while key medical facilities have been raided and burned down.
The PCBS said some 22 percent 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.
Some 60,000 pregnant women also face grave health risks in Gaza, the report said, due to the crumbling healthcare sector and a general lack of access to healthcare.
Babies are often born into harsh circumstances, with families unable to provide adequate support such as basic healthcare.
Several infants have lost their lives in recent days without access to healthcare facilities and due to plummeting temperatures, Gaza’s government media office said.
Israel’s war has displaced almost the entire population of Gaza, forcing tens of thousands of people into makeshift tents in open-air camps.
