1,046,400 children under 18 lived in the Gaza Strip at mid-2023, 47% of the population the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics projects for that date. Every figure a reader is likely to meet about Gaza’s children traces to that bureau or to one other body, the Gaza Ministry of Health, which counts children among the dead on lists it compiles and publishes itself. Both are parties to the events they report, and each measures something the other does not. The Gaza Ministry of Health reported 872 infants under one year inside a child count of 15,613 on 23 March 2025, and the same ministry has stated since 7 January 2024 that the missing and the bodies trapped under rubble are not counted at all, which is why the question of how many of Gaza’s children are missing has no primary record behind it.
Key Findings
- 1,046,400 children under 18 lived in Gaza at mid-2023, 47% of a projected population of 2,226,544, split 534,000 male and 512,400 female. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics labels the series a revised estimate based on the final results of its census of 1 December 2017, so it is a projection and never an enumeration.
- The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics measured Gaza’s annual unemployment rate at 45.3% in 2022 against 13.1% in the West Bank, on one household survey run to one set of definitions, with discouraged jobseekers excluded by the Bureau’s own stated rule.
- 59.3% of Gazans aged 15 to 29 were unemployed in the second quarter of 2023, against 22.4% in the West Bank. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics measured it, and the World Bank reported it in September 2023 to the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee, in the last such report before 7 October.
- $300.7 of output stood behind each Gaza resident in the third quarter of 2023 at constant 2015 prices, against $1,129.1 in the West Bank, on quarterly national accounts the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics publishes itself. 47% of the people that output was divided among were under 18.
- 872 of 15,613 children counted among the dead had not completed a first year, on the Gaza Ministry of Health’s statement of 23 March 2025, a health ministry under the authority governing Gaza reporting its own count. The same ministry publishes category lists for children, women, the elderly and the orphans of martyrs, and none for the missing.
How many children lived in Gaza before the war?
1,046,400 children under 18 lived in the Gaza Strip at mid-2023, 47% of the population the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics projects for that date. The Bureau labels the series a revised estimate based on the final results of its census of 1 December 2017, so the number is carried forward from a measured base rather than counted.
The measured base is the census itself. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics counted 1,899,291 residents of the Gaza Strip on the reference date of 1 December 2017, in the third and most recent census a Palestinian statistical authority has conducted. Every population figure for Gaza after that date, including the one above, is projected off it.
The Bureau publishes the projection broken down. Of the 1,046,400, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics records 534,000 male and 512,400 female, and prints the five-year bands beneath: 171,595 boys and 165,462 girls aged 0 to 4, 145,276 and 139,182 aged 5 to 9, 141,660 and 135,532 aged 10 to 14, and 75,469 and 72,224 aged 15 to 17.
Two properties travel with that figure. The Bureau is a party to the events it reports, and its own later brief states that the Gaza population at the end of 2025 stood below the pre-war projections, attributing the change to war-related deaths, missing persons, reduced births and forced out-migration together. So 1,046,400 is a pre-war quantity, and reading any wartime count against it compares a wartime numerator to a projected pre-war base. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics states that basis on its own source lines, which is what makes both limits checkable rather than inferred.
Do the two published child shares, 47% and 40%, disagree?
No: 47% and 40% are two age cut-offs on one population rather than two estimates of one quantity, and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics published them three months apart. The first counts every child under 18, the second stops three years earlier, and the two reconcile exactly on the Bureau’s own published age bands.
The arithmetic is short enough to check. Summing the bands the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics publishes for ages 0 to 4, 5 to 9 and 10 to 14 gives 898,707 children under 15, which is 40.4% of the projected mid-2023 population of 2,226,544. Adding the 15-to-17 band gives 1,046,400 under 18, which is 47.0% of the same base. That sum is arithmetic on the Bureau’s published bands rather than a total the Bureau itself prints.
The 15-to-17 band is therefore 147,693 people, 6.6% of the projected population, and it is the whole of the difference between the two published shares. Neither release revises the other. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics published the first for Palestinian Child Day in April 2023, reporting the under-18 population because childhood was its subject, and published the second for World Population Day three months later, reporting the conventional demographic split at 0 to 14 and 65 and over.
Reading the two as rival estimates of one quantity is the error the pair invites, and it produces a seven-point discrepancy that does not exist. What the pair does show is a structural fact about the population the blockade-era figures below are divided among: on either cut-off the Gaza Strip’s child share runs well above the West Bank’s, which the same bureau reported as 41% under 18 and 35% under 15 for the same date.
Did the same eleven years look the same in the West Bank?
No: the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics measured Gaza’s annual unemployment rate at 45.3% in 2022 against 13.1% in the West Bank, the far ends of a gap that had been opening for eleven years. Both series come from one bureau, one household survey and one set of definitions, so the divergence is not an artefact of two methods being set against each other.
The two series start close and separate. In 2012 the Bureau recorded Gaza at 30.8% and the West Bank at 18.8%, a gap of twelve points. By 2022 it recorded Gaza at 45.3% and the West Bank at 13.1%, a gap of thirty-two. Gaza’s rate crossed 40% in 2014, fell back, and then rose in every year from 2015 to 2021 before easing slightly, while the West Bank’s drifted down across the same decade.
The definition matters to what the numbers mean. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics counts as unemployed those aged 15 and above who did not work at all in the reference period, were not absent from a job, were available for work and had actively sought a job in the previous four weeks. It states separately that discouraged jobseekers, people available for work who are not currently seeking it but sought it within the past six months, are excluded. In a labour market where seeking work has been unproductive for a decade, an exclusion of that kind pushes the measured rate down rather than up.
This is the environment the 1,046,400 children of the previous section were born into and grew up in. A child who was 7 years old in 2012 turned 18 in 2023, and the eleven-year series the Bureau published is the whole of that child’s schooling set beside the same bureau’s reading of the territory next door.
What did the labour market record for the generation raised under the blockade?
59.3% of Gazans aged 15 to 29 were unemployed in the second quarter of 2023, against 22.4% of the same cohort in the West Bank. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics measured it on its own source lines, and the World Bank reported it in September 2023 to the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee, in the last such report the Bank produced before 7 October.
The figure splits by sex, and the split is wide. Among young Gazan men the Bureau recorded 54.0%; among young Gazan women it recorded 77.1%. The West Bank comparison runs 17.0% and 42.8%. So the lowest of the four Gaza readings sits more than three times above the lowest West Bank reading, and the highest sits close to eight in ten.
Two features of the underlying survey bound what those shares describe. They are shares of the labour force rather than of the age group: a young person who is not available for work or not seeking it falls outside the denominator entirely, and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics put Gaza’s overall labour force participation rate in the same quarter at 39.9% against 47.8% in the West Bank. The same discouraged-jobseeker exclusion applies here as in the annual series.
The World Bank reported the quarter’s other readings alongside. Gaza’s economy contracted by 2.6% year on year in the first quarter of 2023 while the West Bank grew 4.3%, a contraction the Bank attributes chiefly to agriculture, forestry and fishing. Every Gaza figure in that report carries a Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics source line, so the Bank relayed the numbers and supplied the framing and measured none of them itself.
What output stood behind each resident in the last full quarter before the war?
$300.7 of output stood behind each Gaza resident in the third quarter of 2023, at constant 2015 prices, against $1,129.1 in the West Bank and $773.0 for Palestine as a whole. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics publishes those figures in its own quarterly national accounts, and they are quarterly rather than annual.
That was the last full quarter before 7 October 2023, and it was not an outlier in the series. The Bureau’s quarterly readings for Gaza run 313.9, 318.3, 305.8 and 314.5 across the four quarters of 2022, then 297.7, 290.0 and 300.7 across the first three of 2023. The line is flat and slightly declining, so the third quarter of 2023 is an ordinary reading of a settled level rather than a shock.
Three cautions belong with the comparison. The ratio between the Gaza and West Bank figures is arithmetic a reader performs, not a figure the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics publishes. A quarterly per-capita figure cannot be multiplied into an annual one and set against an annual national-accounts total, because the two are different products. And the denominator is the projected population of the first section, so the per-capita line inherits every limit that projection carries.
The reason the figure belongs in a report about children is the denominator itself. 47% of the people among whom that output was divided were under 18, on the same bureau’s projection for the same date, the highest child share of the three geographies the accounts report. Output per person is not a measure of any child’s circumstances, and the Bureau makes no such claim for it. It is a measure of how much economic activity the territory registered, set against how many people lived there.
How many of the children counted had not reached their first birthday?
872 of 15,613 children counted among the dead had not completed a first year, on the Gaza Ministry of Health’s statement of 23 March 2025. The same statement records 247 children born and killed during the war. Both are the count of a health ministry under the authority governing Gaza, reporting on its own record, and neither is independently verified.
The Gaza Ministry of Health issued that statement alongside its daily report for the same date, which recorded 50,021 dead and 113,274 injured. The child figure is drawn from the same record and on the same date, which is the only basis on which the infant breakdown can be read, since dividing 15,613 into a total published for a different day compares two moving series.
An earlier statement from the same ministry, dated 13 August 2024, had put 115 infants born and killed during the war. The figure of 247 published seven months later is a later reading of the same category by the same body rather than a second body’s estimate.
What the infant figure describes is narrow and worth stating plainly. It counts deaths of children under one year that entered the ministry’s record, so it inherits every exclusion the Gaza Ministry of Health states for that record, and it says nothing about causes, which the ministry does not classify. It is also the finest age resolution this publisher offers. Below the age of one the ministry publishes a number; above it, the record carries a date of birth per entry and no published breakdown by year of age. A child share of the recorded dead is a different quantity again, and moves with whichever total it is set against.
Why is a child’s age in that list an uncertain field?
Because the date was registered on the family’s report or on the day the body reached a hospital, and the Gaza Ministry of Health stated so itself on 29 July 2024. A committee it then formed to audit the actual date found that a number of those counted had been under 18 at death while being registered several months later, on the ministry’s own account of its own record.
The lists the Gaza Ministry of Health publishes compound the problem in a second way. Their columns carry a serial number, a name, an identity or document number, a date of birth, a sex, an age and a source. They carry no column for the date of death. So the field that fixes a person’s age at the moment that matters is the one field the list does not print, and the age column is computed against a registration date the ministry has itself described as unreliable.
The schema is also not stable between rounds. Three of the four lists the ministry published across 2024 carry a date-of-birth column and a source column; the list of 30 April 2024, running to 24,682 records, carries neither, substituting an address column instead.
| List | Records | Date of birth | Source column |
|---|---|---|---|
| 29 March 2024 | 21,323 | published | published |
| 30 April 2024 | 24,682 | absent | absent |
| 30 June 2024 | 28,185 | published | published |
| 31 August 2024 | 34,344 | published | published |
Source: Ministry of Health, Gaza, the published martyr lists; each is the ministry’s own record and none is independently verified.
The source column, where it appears, is the ministry’s own provenance label, and it decomposes the list into two strata. The list to 30 June 2024 holds 22,368 records marked as ministry records and 5,817 marked as notification by relatives, which are precisely the two input lists Jamaluddine and colleagues used in the capture-recapture analysis The Lancet published in 2025. The list of 30 April, which drops that column, cannot be read the same way at all.
How many children are missing?
The Gaza Ministry of Health publishes no count of missing children, and has stated five exclusions from its record since 7 January 2024, the first of which is that the missing and the bodies trapped under rubble are not counted. The ministry has never withdrawn those exclusions. Its category lists cover children, women, the elderly and the orphans of martyrs, and it publishes no equivalent list for the missing.
The other four exclusions the Gaza Ministry of Health states are of a piece with the first. Unidentified people who reached hospitals are not counted. Unidentified people whose bodies were handed over are not counted. Those buried by their families without passing through a hospital are not counted. And victims in Gaza and North Gaza after the information system stopped in November 2023 are not counted.
So the body that publishes a child count publishes no child-missing count, and says why in its own words: its list is a record of deaths that reached its facilities or were reported to it on a form, which is a different object from a census of the dead and a very different object from a register of the unaccounted for.
This absence is bounded and should be stated with its bounds. It is an absence in the output of one publisher, read across the lists it published, the daily statistical reports it publishes and the completeness statements that travel with them, to 10 September 2026. It is not a finding that no such figure exists anywhere, and it is not a claim about how many children are missing, which no record read here supports in either direction. What it is, is the answer the primary record returns when the question is put to it. The publisher that counts children among the dead does not count the missing, has stated so for more than two years, and publishes nothing that would allow the number to be derived from what it does count.
Which records did reach the count from the missing-persons file?
233 records were added to the Gaza Ministry of Health’s cumulative total on 23 March 2025 and 280 on 30 August 2025, described by the ministry as records completed and approved by a judicial committee following the notifications and missing-persons file. A further 160 were added during August 2026 by a martyrs’ approval committee. Each is the ministry’s own administrative act.
These are the only trace the missing leave in this primary record, and the trace is of a particular kind. An addition of this sort does not register a new death. It registers a file that an approval committee has finished working on, so movement in the total reflects administrative completion rather than an event, and the date attached to the addition is the date of the approval rather than the date of the death.
The scale is worth stating against the counts the same ministry publishes. The three additions total 673 records across seventeen months, set against a cumulative figure the Gaza Ministry of Health reported at 73,670 on 10 September 2026. They are a rounding movement in the total and a substantial body of individual files at the same time.
What they do not do is answer the question of the previous section. A record that completes and enters the count has by definition stopped being a missing-person file, so the additions describe the flow out of that file and never its size. No statement the ministry has published gives the number of files remaining in it, the number of children among them, or the rate at which a committee works through them. The additions are visible; the pool they are drawn from is not.
Methodology
This report reads two publishers, both parties to the events they report, and labels each figure by the body that produced it, the date it covers and its source type.
Official statistics from a national statistical office. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics supplies the child population and its age bands, the unemployment series for 2012 to 2022 and the definitions behind it, the quarterly national accounts for 2022 and 2023, and the youth-unemployment readings for the second quarter of 2023. The Bureau is a party to the events, and every population figure it publishes for Gaza after 1 December 2017 is a projection off the census of that date, in which the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics counted 1,899,291 residents. The Bureau labels the series itself as a revised estimate based on the final results of that census. Its brief on the status of the Palestinian people at the end of 2025 is cited for the downward revision it applies to the pre-war projections.
A party’s own record. The Gaza Ministry of Health supplies the child count, the infant breakdown, the five stated exclusions, the account of how a date of death was registered, the list schemas and the three administrative additions. It is the health ministry of the authority governing Gaza, self-reported throughout, and none of its figures is independently verified.
Compiled reporting and peer-reviewed research. The World Bank reported the second-quarter 2023 labour-market readings in Racing Against Time, its September 2023 report to the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee, on Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics source lines, and measured none of them. Jamaluddine and colleagues published the capture-recapture analysis in The Lancet in 2025, cited here only for the two ministry input lists it worked from.
Five limits bear on the reading. A projected population is not a count, and the word projected is used throughout for that reason. The 47% and 40% shares are two age cut-offs from one bureau and are never presented as competing estimates. The 898,707 and 147,693 figures are arithmetic on the Bureau’s own published bands and are marked as such. No figure from the ministry is divided into a total published on a different date. And the absence recorded in the missing-children section is bounded to one publisher’s own output, read to 10 September 2026, rather than offered as a statement about the wider record.
Conclusion
So how does the blockade show up in the record of Gaza’s 1,046,400 children? It shows up as two publishers and one gap between them. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics projects that child population at 47% of the whole and measures the market the generation entered: 45.3% unemployment in 2022 against 13.1% next door, 59.3% among 15 to 29 year olds in the last measured quarter before the war, and $300.7 of quarterly output per resident against $1,129.1 in the West Bank. The Gaza Ministry of Health counts children among the dead, 872 of 15,613 of them too young to have finished a first year, on a list whose age column is computed against a registration date the ministry itself has called unreliable.
Neither publisher conceals what it cannot do. The Bureau prints the source line that says its population is projected. The ministry printed five exclusions on 7 January 2024, has never withdrawn them, and put the missing at the head of the list. Between the two, almost every quantity a reader could want about Gaza’s children is published by somebody, dated, and checkable against the body that produced it.
The one quantity neither publishes is the one the question keeps returning to. A ministry that issues separate lists for children, for women, for the elderly and for the orphans of the dead issues none for the missing, and the only trace they leave in its record is 673 files an approval committee finished and moved into the count. Those children were entered on the day the paperwork closed, not on the day they died.
An absence in a record is still a fact about the record, and this one has a shape: a number that exists in the world and in no ledger, held by families rather than by a bureau. What does a society owe a child whose death is certain to someone and unrecorded everywhere, and who decides when the counting of them begins?
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Gaza’s population described as projected rather than counted?
Because the last enumeration was the census of 1 December 2017, in which the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics counted 1,899,291 residents of the Gaza Strip. The Bureau carries every later figure forward from that base and labels the series a revised estimate based on the census’s final results, so a mid-2023 population is a modelled figure and not a head count.
Which body publishes Gaza separately from the West Bank?
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics does, across its population, labour-force and national-accounts products. That separation is what makes the comparisons in this report possible at all, since the same bureau runs one survey to one definition across both territories and reports the two side by side.
Does the unemployment rate include people who stopped looking for work?
No. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics counts as unemployed those aged 15 and above who did not work at all in the reference period, were available for work and had actively sought a job in the previous four weeks, and it states that discouraged jobseekers are excluded from that count. A discouraged jobseeker is someone available for work who is not currently seeking it but sought it within the past six months.
Why does the report give output per resident by quarter rather than by year?
Because that is how the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics publishes it. The quarterly national accounts report gross domestic product per person for each three-month period at constant 2015 prices, and multiplying a quarterly figure by four produces a number the Bureau does not publish and would not endorse.
Does the Gaza Ministry of Health publish a cause of death for children?
No. The lists it publishes carry a serial number, a name, an identity or document number, a date of birth, a sex, an age and, in three of the four 2024 rounds, a provenance label. There is no cause field and no combatant or noncombatant field, so no share of any kind can be derived from the list on either question.
What is the difference between the ministry’s daily total and its named lists?
The daily statistical report the Gaza Ministry of Health publishes gives a cumulative total of everyone it records as having reached its facilities, while the named lists carry only those records whose data the ministry has finished. The two move at different rates, which is why a figure from one is never subtracted from a figure from the other.
Who added the 233 and 280 records, and on what basis?
The Gaza Ministry of Health did, describing them as records completed and approved by a judicial committee following the notifications and missing-persons file, on 23 March 2025 and 30 August 2025. A further 160 were added during August 2026 by a body the ministry names as a martyrs’ approval committee. All three are the ministry’s own administrative acts on its own record.
Does any published figure say how many children remain unaccounted for?
None was found in the output of the body that publishes the child count. The Gaza Ministry of Health states that the missing and the bodies under rubble are outside its record, publishes no missing-persons list alongside its category lists, and releases nothing from which such a number could be derived.
Sources
- Jamaluddine, Abukmail, Aly, Campbell and Checchi, 2025. Traumatic injury mortality in the Gaza Strip from Oct 7, 2023, to June 30, 2024: a capture-recapture analysis. The Lancet, 405(10477), pp. 469 to 477. DOI 10.1016/S0140-6736(24)02678-3. Peer-reviewed.
- Ministry of Health, Gaza, 2024 to 2026, ongoing. The published martyr lists, the daily statistical report, and the completeness statements that travel with them. Official record (a party to the war, self-reported and not independently verified).
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2017. Population, Housing and Establishment Census 2017 (Third Round): Final Results. Ramallah. pcbs.gov.ps. Official record (national census).
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2023. The pre-October-2023 Gaza baseline: unemployment, gross domestic product and age structure. Ramallah. pcbs.gov.ps. Official record (national statistical office, a party to the events).
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. A Brief on the Status of the Palestinian People at the End of 2025. Ramallah. pcbs.gov.ps. Official record (national statistical office).
- World Bank, 2023. Racing Against Time: World Bank Economic Monitoring Report to the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee, September 2023. documents1.worldbank.org. Compiled international reporting (Gaza figures measured by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics).