How Much Room Is There for Two Populations Between the River and the Sea? Reading Both Statistical Registers, the Refugee Counts and the Fertility Series

The territory reads small on a map, and it is: the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics recorded 5,853 persons per square kilometre in the Gaza Strip in 2021, against 878 across the State of Palestine and 557 in the West Bank, with the Gaza district alone at 9,683. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counted about 10.244 million residents on 22 April 2026, on preliminary estimates based on the 2022 census. So the question of whether ground this size can hold what two populations ask of it has a measured answer on one side of the ledger and a definitional dispute on the other: the two statistical registers do not share a denominator, a refugee definition, or an agreement on who is counted where.

Key Findings

• The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the Palestinian Authority’s own statistical office, reported density of 878 persons per square kilometre for the State of Palestine in 2021, 557 in the West Bank and 5,853 in the Gaza Strip, with the Gaza district at 9,683 and North Gaza at 6,958.
• Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counted 10.244 million residents on 22 April 2026, comprising 7.790 million Jews and others (76%), 2.157 million Arabs (21.1%) and 296,000 foreigners (2.9%), the last relating to the end of 2025.
• The United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine’s Technical Committee estimated approximately 711,000 refugees from Israel-controlled territory in its report of 7 September 1949, an estimate its own authors described as only “as accurate as circumstances permit” after deciding a census was not advisable.
• Israel’s total fertility rate was 2.89 children per woman in 2022 on the Central Bureau of Statistics’ own figures, and the Bureau’s series by population group shows the Jewish and Muslim rates converged to within about a tenth of a child.
• The last full Palestinian enumeration, the 2017 census, counted 4,780,978 residents of the West Bank and Gaza; every later total in the Palestinian and World Bank series is a projection off thatbase rather than a count.

How densely do Palestinians live in the West Bank and Gaza?

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the Palestinian Authority’s own statistical office, reported density of 5,853 persons per square kilometre in the Gaza Strip for 2021, against 557 in the West Bank and 878 across the State of Palestine.

Within Gaza the figure rises further by district: 9,683 in the Gaza district and 6,958 in North Gaza, on the same table.

These are the party’s own compiled counts, not independently verified, and they carry the Bureau’s own scope. The denominator is the West Bank and Gaza only; the numerator, for every year after 1 December 2017, is a projection off the 2017 census rather than an enumeration. That census counted 4,780,978 residents, 2,881,687 in the West Bank and 1,899,291 in Gaza, and the Bureau states that East Jerusalem could not be directly enumerated, so administrative estimates were used there.

UN-Habitat reported an average of 735 persons per square kilometre for Palestine in 2019 and described Gaza’s density as exceeding 4,500 per square kilometre. The two readings are two years and two methods apart, and neither supersedes the other; cited together they bracket the same finding rather than contradicting it.

The Bureau’s own later accounting revises the Gaza numerator sharply downward. Its brief on the status of the Palestinian people at the end of 2025 puts Gaza at about 2.13 million, a decline of approximately 254,000 people, which the brief states is a decrease of 10.6% against pre-aggression population estimates. Those two figures reconcile on their own base: 2.13 million plus 254,000 is 2.384 million, and 254,000 of that is 10.6%. The Bureau separately reports that roughly 2.2 million people were living in Gaza on the eve of the war, that nearly two million of them were displaced, and that roughly 100,000 have left the Strip. It attributes the change to war-related deaths, missing persons, reduced births and forced out-migration, and it is a demographic net decline rather than a casualty count.

So the density question as posed has a measured answer on the Palestinian side of the ledger: the densest districts in the Palestinian statistical record sit above 9,000 persons per square kilometre, on the Bureau’s own 2021 figures, before the population movements of 2023 onward.

Is the land actually as small as it sounds?

Yes. The territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean runs to roughly 27,000 square kilometres, and it holds two populations of broadly comparable size: Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counted 10.244 million residents on 22 April 2026, and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics counted 4,780,978 residents of the West Bank and Gaza at the 2017 census, its last enumeration.

The premise in the question is therefore conceded rather than disputed. What the figures reframe is whose constraint it is. The Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs estimated 7.1 million Palestinians inside historic Palestine by mid-2022, or 49.9% of the population there, a figure that organisation compiled itself and which is not an official statistic of either statistical office. On the other side of the same line, the demographer Sergio DellaPergola estimated the world’s core Jewish population at 15,736,800 on 1 January 2024, of whom 7,153,000 lived in Israel, in his chapter for the American Jewish Year Book 2024. That is the author’s own estimate, hosted online by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, which did not produce it.

Three registers, three scopes, and they do not stack. Israel’s Bureau counts East Jerusalem residents and West Bank settlers inside Israel’s total, a scope choice distinct from the international convention, which the settlement monitor B’Tselem follows in publishing its West Bank and East Jerusalem series separately. The Palestinian Bureau’s territory is the West Bank and Gaza. PASSIA’s 7.1 million counts Palestinians across historic Palestine including Israel’s Arab citizens. So a single denominator covering all of the land between the river and the sea is not published by any of the three bodies, and any such total is somebody’s assembly of parts measured on different definitions.

What survives all three scopes is the ratio the question turns on. On the Palestinian Bureau’s 2021 table the State of Palestine held 878 persons per square kilometre. Israel’s Bureau reports its population growing by 146,000, an increase of 1.4%, over the 11.75 months to 22 April 2026, of which about 177,000 were infants born and about 21,000 immigrants arriving. Neither population is contracting, and both are sharing the same 27,000 square kilometres.

What does Israel’s own statistical record show about its population?

Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counted 806,000 residents at the establishment of the State in 1948, against a 2026 population it puts at more than 12.5 times that figure.

The same release records over 3.5 million immigrants arriving since 1948, of whom about 1.68 million (47.8%) arrived from 1990 onward, plus about 158,000 immigrating citizens since 1970.

These are the Bureau’s own official statistics for Israel’s resident population, and they are the counterweight the density question needs, because the constraint is not one-sided. Israel’s 2026 breakdown gives 7.790 million Jews and others (76%), 2.157 million Arabs (21.1%) and 296,000 foreigners (2.9%). The Bureau’s definitions are its own: “Others” covers non-Arab Christians, other religions, and those registered as not classified by religion; “Arabs” covers Moslems, Arab Christians and Druze.

The growth has two components, and the ingathering half is documented in the founding instrument itself. The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, read on 14 May 1948 and published in Official Gazette Number 1, declares that the state “shall be open to Jewish immigration, and the ingathering of the exiles” in the clause the Knesset publishes as its English text. The Basic Law the Knesset adopted in 2018 restates it at clause 5. What followed is measurable. William Berthomière, writing in the Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales in 1995, recorded more than 500,000 migrants arriving in Israel from the former Soviet Union from 1989. H. Factor and J. Habib, modelling elderly service costs in Public Finance in 1993, put Israel’s population rise between 1990 and 1993 at about 10%, with projected growth above 30% by the end of that decade.

Later waves are counted the same way. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics recorded 168,800 residents of Ethiopian origin at the end of 2022, comprising approximately 92,100 born in Ethiopia and 76,800 born in Israel to Ethiopian-born fathers, with 1,680 immigrants arriving from Ethiopia in 2022 alone.

Migration is not the whole of it, and the Bureau’s own arithmetic says so. Over the 11.75 months to 22 April 2026 it records about 177,000 infants born against about 21,000 immigrants arriving and about 48,000 deaths. Immigration built the state’s first decades; births now drive most of its annual increase, on the Bureau’s own components of change.

How many Palestinians are refugees or descendants of refugees?

The United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine’s Technical Committee estimated approximately 711,000 refugees from Israel-controlled territory in its report of 7 September 1949, published in the Commission’s general progress report of 23 October 1950. It is the earliest intergovernmental count, and its own authors describe it as only “as accurate as circumstances permit” after considering a census and concluding one was not advisable.

That is a count of an original cohort, not of the registered population today, and the two are different objects. Michael R. Fischbach’s archival history, published by Columbia University Press in 2003, gives the displacement as more than 726,000 people, over half the entire population, uprooted from late 1947 through 1948. A peer-reviewed article in the Israel Law Review reports that in the course of the military operations about 400 Palestinian towns and villages were destroyed, resulting in the expulsion and flight of about 80% of the residents of the areas on which Israel was established. These are three measurements of three different quantities, and they are not summed.

Registration counts are the reason the claim extends past current residents of the West Bank and Gaza. PASSIA reproduced figures from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency counting close to 5 million registered Palestine refugees, with about 1.5 million living in refugee camps across the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Those are the agency’s own registration figures on the agency’s own eligibility rules, relayed by PASSIA, not a measured share of any population. WAFA, the Palestinian news agency, reported in 2022 that 66% of Gaza’s population were refugees, which is a party’s own reporting.

The two categories are not demographically identical, which is itself measured. Sulayman S. Al-Qudsi, writing in International Migration in 2000, compared refugee and non-refugee Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and found refugees somewhat better educated than non-refugees while showing only slightly higher fertility. The publisher withholds that paper’s abstract and gates its full text, so the finding is carried at the level of the comparison the paper states.

So the refugee figure and the resident figure answer different questions. The Palestinian Bureau’s 4,780,978 counts people present in the West Bank and Gaza on 1 December 2017. The registration count reaches a population dispersed across five jurisdictions, on definitions the registering agency sets.

What do historians actually dispute about the 1948 displacement?

Two archival historians working the same period reach different conclusions about intent, and both are named in the literature as the poles of the dispute. Benny Morris, in the second edition of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge University Press, 2004), carries roughly 700,000 as his own archival estimate of the displacement and attributes it to multiple causes varying by locality and phase.

Morris’s causes, as he sets them out, include military attack and fear of attack, expulsions in certain sectors, and flight. He rejects both a single master expulsion plan and the claim that departures were voluntary. Ilan Pappé, in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications, 2006), argues from overlapping material that the 1948 displacement was a planned ethnic cleansing, and his title is the home of that characterisation in the scholarly literature.

The two are not reconcilable on the record as it stands, and neither is a measurement of the other’s claim. Morris works from Israeli military and state archives; Pappé states a moral position in his own text. The Anti-Defamation League publishes a standing page rejecting the ethnic-cleansing characterisation, which is an advocacy organisation’s position and is labelled as one.

The intergovernmental record is narrower than either argument and deliberately so. The Conciliation Commission’s Technical Committee wrote of “the refugees from Israel-controlled territory” and nowhere says anyone was expelled, driven out, or left voluntarily. It counted; it did not attribute cause. That distinction matters for anyone reading a displacement figure as an account of what happened: the 711,000 is a number, and the causes of the movement it measures are where Morris and Pappé divide.

A Turkish-language review by Seda Ermiş and Emine Erden Kaya in Anadolu Strateji Dergisi in 2024 sets out the same span as continuous narrative history, quoting the Genocide Convention’s Article II act categories in definitional terms and relaying casualty figures from other authors rather than measuring any of its own.

What is common ground across the archival work is the scale and the period. What is disputed is intent, planning and the applicability of the word each author chooses. A report that presents either author’s characterisation as settled has adopted one side of a live historiographical dispute in which both poles are peer-reviewed or university-press work.

Why do the population numbers themselves get disputed?

Every density figure rests on a numerator and a denominator, and named researchers contest both. Bennett Zimmerman, Roberta Seid and Michael L. Wise, in a 2006 Begin-Sadat Center study, calculated 2.49 million Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza through mid-2004 against the 3.83 million the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported, a gap of 1.34 million they characterised as a roughly 50% overstatement.

Their itemisation is specific: 325,000 residents living abroad, 210,000 East Jerusalem Arabs they say were double-counted in Israel’s survey, a 113,000 unexplained jump over prior Israeli records, 238,000 in unmet birth forecasts, 70,000 in retroactively altered birth data, and a 310,000 immigration-versus-emigration error. The study is not peer-reviewed, was led by a business consultant, a historian and a physicist, and carries the policy thesis that Israel’s demographic concern is overstated.

Professional demographers contest it. Sergio DellaPergola of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in a paired 2005 Jerusalem Center brief, built his Palestinian base from Israeli rather than Palestinian census data and still reached about 3.4 million in the West Bank and Gaza, near the official figures the study disputes. Yakov Faitelson restated the overcount thesis in Middle East Quarterly in 2009, and notes that the Palestinian Authority criticised the 2007 census for undercounting East Jerusalem, so the dispute runs in both directions.

Ian S. Lustick audited the campaign in the peer-reviewed Middle East Journal in 2013, concluding that it rests on “complex but systematic manipulation of data” rather than a genuine over-count, and documenting proposals to annex 60% or more of the West Bank attached to it.

The counting conventions are themselves documented as political. Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler and Lihi Ben Shitrit reviewed the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics Yearbook from 1967 forward in a 2020 POMEPS paper, recording that East Jerusalem moved into the general population count for Israel proper in the 1968 yearbook, that a 1970 footnote folded settlers into Israel’s total, that settlement localities entered the count of Israeli localities by 1983, and that the separate territories chapter was removed in 1997. “Normalization” is those authors’ analytic framing.

Israel’s Bureau counts Jerusalem, including the neighbourhoods annexed after 1967, as a single municipal population: 60.5% Jews and others and 39.5% Arabs at the end of 2023, on preliminary estimates.

Why is density rising for both populations at once?

Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reported a total fertility rate of 2.89 children per woman in 2022, and its own series by population group shows the Jewish and Muslim rates within Israel converging to within about a tenth of a child, with the Christian and Druze rates below replacement.

That convergence is the finding, and it runs against the expectation that one population’s growth is driving the constraint. Barbara S. Okun, in Population Studies in 2016, examined why secular, native-born Jewish women in Israel hold above-replacement fertility despite high socio-economic status, attributing it to a constellation of factors: state and family support for childbearing, a dual emphasis on women’s employment and fertility, strong familism and marriage, relatively egalitarian gender relations, and, as one factor among several, Jewish nationalism in an ethno-national conflict setting. Rachel Shenhav-Goldberg, Robert Brym and Talia Lenton-Brym read the same anomaly differently in the Canadian Review of Sociology in 2019, attributing it to religious and nationalist sentiment heightened by a perceived demographic threat, together with the world’s most extensive publicly funded in vitro fertilisation system. The two are a genuine scholarly disagreement about the same measured rate.

On the Palestinian side the long trend is downward. Marwan Khawaja, in Population Studies in 2000, found the fertility transition well underway in the West Bank since about 1985, with a lull during the first Intifada, and no clear sign of a transition in the Gaza Strip, attributing a measured recent rise chiefly to changes in marital structure and higher marital fertility among younger women. A 2007 simulation by M. A. Sumour and colleagues reports Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics fertility inputs of 6.77 in 1992, 6.06 in 1994 and 5.93 in 1999, with an official projection near 3.06 for 2025.

Within Israel, L. Daniel Staetsky documented in Population Studies in 2019 that the Muslim total fertility rate fell from nearly 10 children per woman in the mid-1960s to about 4.5 in the mid-1980s, then held near 4.5 for roughly two decades, a stall he attributes to abrupt discontinuations in the declines of both the proportion married and marital fertility.

Philippe Fargues, in Population and Development Review in 2000, read the whole century’s fertility on both sides as tracking national conflict and pronatal sentiment rather than a smooth modernisation curve, and recorded that fertility was framed as national strength by Palestinians and Israelis alike. His is interpretive demographic analysis rather than a single measured sample.

How much of the West Bank do Palestinians administer today?

The signed Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement of 28 September 1995 divides the West Bank into three areas and hands the Palestinian Council civil powers and responsibilities, including planning and zoning, in Areas A and B only. In Area C, by the same text, “Israel will transfer to the Council civil powers and responsibilities not relating to territory.”

The Agreement’s Article XVII separates three jurisdictions, and the separation is the answer. Territorial jurisdiction covers West Bank territory “except for Area C” and “includes land, subsoil and territorial waters.” Personal jurisdiction applies “to all persons, except for Israelis.” Article XVII(1) lists what sits outside Council jurisdiction entirely: “Jerusalem, settlements, specified military locations, Palestinian refugees, borders, foreign relations and Israelis.” Article XII(5) ties the two together by definition: “'the Settlements’ means, in the West Bank the settlements in Area C.”

No area percentage appears anywhere in that Agreement. Areas A and B are defined by a red line and shading on its map No. 1, and Area C is defined residually as whatever is left. Every share of the West Bank in circulation was therefore measured by some other body afterward. The lawyer Alaa Mahajna, writing for Arab Center Washington DC in 2026, states that Area C comprises around 60% of the West Bank and that prior to 1967, 18.4% of Area C was registered as state land, with 24.5% declared state land after the occupation, leaving around 57% subject to Israel’s land registration plan. He names no measuring body for any of the three shares, and the piece is a policy argument rather than a measurement.

The transfers the Agreement schedules did not complete. Annex I provides three further redeployments, each six months apart, “within 18 months from the date of the inauguration of the Council,” and Article XXXI(5) sets permanent status negotiations to commence no later than 4 May 1996.

Israel’s own commissioned review found the state had built outside its own rules. The Sasson opinion, published in English by the Prime Minister’s Office in March 2005, recorded 105 unauthorized outposts known to its author, “probably does not reflect the true number,” of which 26 sat on State land, 7 on survey lands, 15 on Palestinian private property and 39 on mixed lands, with 18 unresolved. Its finding: “State and public authorities took part in breaking the law.”

Does conflict coverage measurably change attitudes toward Jews?

Bahar Ozer, Milan Obaidi and Robin Bergh, in the International Journal of Intercultural Relations in 2025, primed British samples with war-in-Gaza material and measured hostility toward Jews, finding two separate pathways: political orientation associated with anti-Jewish hostility through social dominance orientation, and conservative orientation negatively associated with antisemitism through out-group identity fusion with the Palestinian people.

Their Study 1 ran with 354 participants and Study 2 with 490, and the second pathway is the one that bears on this question: an identity-based route on the left that conflates attitudes toward Israel with prejudice toward Jews. These are measured associations in experimental samples, not causal claims, and the authors’ own framing is carried here.

An earlier study found the link ran through identification rather than exposure. L. Rowell Huesmann, Eric F. Dubow, Paul Boxer, Violet Souweidane and Jeremy Ginges, in the Journal of Research on Adolescence in 2012, surveyed 89 Jewish American and 180 Arab American high-school students and found that total media exposure to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict did not directly predict stereotypes. The association ran through identification with the groups as portrayed in the media. Both groups held more negative stereotypes about the out-group than the in-group, with ethnic identity correlating with implicit out-group stereotyping at r = -0.70.

Jeremy Harber, Dominika Bulska, Thomas E. Malloy and Julián Vila, in American Psychologist in 2026, ran three preregistered studies (N = 373, 243 and 493) and report that their Conspiracies Mediated Model of New Antisemitism accounted for over 55% of the variance in anti-Israel attitudes. Their measured mediator is specific: conspiracy beliefs implicating Israel and Zionists mediated the association between antisemitism and anti-Israel attitudes, while conspiracy beliefs about Jews unrelated to Israel did not, and a general conspiratorial mindset did not explain the results. The paper is abstract-sourced.

So the measured relationship is not that discussing this territory produces prejudice. It is narrower and it is conditional: in these samples, the association ran through identification with a portrayed group, through social dominance orientation, and through conspiracy beliefs naming Israel specifically. Each is a correlation in a stated sample with a stated bound, and none of the three studies establishes direction of cause.

Methodology

This report draws on four source types, each labelled where it appears.

Official and primary records supply the population and density figures: the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics’ 2021 area and density table, its 2017 Population, Housing and Establishments Census, and its brief on the status of the Palestinian people at the end of 2025; Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics releases for Independence Day 2026, Rosh Hashana 5786, Jerusalem Day 2024, Israel in Figures 2023, and the population of Ethiopian origin; the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement of 28 September 1995 as published by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs; the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel as published by the Knesset; the Sasson opinion as published by Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office in March 2005; and the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine’s general progress report of 23 October 1950, whose refugee estimate comes from its Technical Committee’s appendix of 7 September 1949.

Peer-reviewed research supplies the fertility, displacement and attitudinal findings. Scholarly books supply the archival displacement histories: Morris (2004) and Pappé (2006) are cited as the named poles of a live dispute, and Fischbach (2003) for the displacement figure his publisher states.

Two limits bear on every density figure here. First, the last full Palestinian enumeration is the 2017 census; every later Palestinian total, including the denominators of density figures for 2018 onward, is a projection off that base, as the Bureau states on its own source lines. Second, the two statistical offices do not share a scope: Israel’s Bureau counts East Jerusalem residents and West Bank settlers inside Israel’s total, while the Palestinian Bureau’s territory is the West Bank and Gaza, and its 2017 census used administrative estimates for East Jerusalem because it could not enumerate there. No single register covers all of the territory between the river and the sea.

Party-reported figures are attributed as such: PASSIA’s 7.1 million, WAFA’s 66% refugee share for Gaza, and the UNRWA registration counts PASSIA relays are each the reporting body’s own count on its own definitions.

The attitudinal studies in the final section are correlational. Where a source is a preprint, an abstract-only reading, or a think-tank estimate rather than a measurement, that status is stated at first use. Zimmerman, Seid and Wise (2006) is a contested think-tank estimate and is never presented as a measured population figure.

Conclusion

So how much room is there? On the Palestinian Bureau’s own 2021 figures, the Gaza district held 9,683 persons per square kilometre and North Gaza 6,958, against 557 across the West Bank. Israel’s Bureau counted 10.244 million residents in April 2026 on a territory that, with the West Bank and Gaza, runs to roughly 27,000 square kilometres. The smallness in the question is real, and it is the shared term.

What the registers establish, taken together, is that neither population is small and neither is shrinking. Israel grew from 806,000 residents in 1948 to more than twelve and a half times that on its own count, about 177,000 infants born in the last eleven and three-quarter months against about 21,000 immigrants arriving. Palestinian fertility fell from 6.77 in 1992 to an official projection near 3.06 for 2025, and Israeli fertility stood at 2.89 in 2022 with the Jewish and Muslim rates within a tenth of a child of each other. The Conciliation Commission put approximately 711,000 refugees from Israel-controlled territory in 1949, and UNRWA’s registration now reaches close to 5 million across five jurisdictions. Every one of those numbers rests on a denominator that Zimmerman, Seid and Wise dispute, that Lustick audited, and that Hirsch-Hoefler and Ben Shitrit traced through fifty years of a single yearbook’s changing conventions.

The question as typed asks about need, and the registers answer a narrower thing: what each body counts, where, and on whose definitions. But the narrower answer carries the harder one. Two statistical offices measure the same ground and produce populations that cannot be added, refugee categories that cannot be reconciled, and a municipal count in Jerusalem that appears in one total and not the other. When Ozer and colleagues found that hostility toward Jews ran through identity fusion in one sample and social dominance in another, and Harber and colleagues found conspiracy beliefs naming Israel accounting for over half the variance in anti-Israel attitudes, they were measuring what happens downstream of a dispute in which the basic counts are themselves contested. Which raises the question this report cannot settle from either register: when the figures a person reaches for depend on which office did the counting, what carries the argument the rest of the way?

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do Palestinian and Israeli population totals not add up to one figure?

Because the two statistical offices measure different territories on different conventions. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counts East Jerusalem residents and West Bank settlers inside Israel’s total; the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics covers the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli Bureau’s own 2026 breakdown also holds three categories, 7.790 million Jews and others, 2.157 million Arabs and 296,000 foreigners, so a two-part split of its total is always short.

How recent is the last actual Palestinian census?

1 December 2017, the reference date of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics’ third census, which counted 4,780,978 residents of the West Bank and Gaza. The Bureau has conducted three censuses in total, in 1997, 2007 and 2017. Every total after 2017, in the Palestinian series and in the World Bank’s West Bank and Gaza series, is a projection off that base.

Which body publishes Gaza separately from the West Bank?

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics does, and effectively it alone. The World Bank’s World Development Indicators carry a single entity, “West Bank and Gaza,” with no Gaza-only series, and the UN Population Division publishes “State of Palestine” without disaggregating Gaza. Any Gaza-specific economic or density figure therefore traces to the Palestinian Bureau or is a combined figure mislabelled.

Why does Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics count settlers inside Israel’s total?

The convention developed over decades rather than at once. Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler and Lihi Ben Shitrit, in a 2020 POMEPS paper, record that East Jerusalem entered the general population count for Israel proper in the 1968 yearbook, that a 1970 footnote folded settlers in as “Israeli residents in the Administrated Territories,” and that the separate territories chapter was removed in 1997.

Who decided which parts of the West Bank Palestinians administer?

The Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement of 28 September 1995, signed by Israel and the PLO and witnessed by the United States, the Russian Federation, Egypt, Jordan, Norway and the European Union. Its Article XI defines Areas A and B by a red line and shading on its own map and defines Area C residually as the remainder. The Agreement contains no area percentage anywhere in its text.

What is the difference between the 711,000 and the UNRWA registration figure?

They count different things. The 711,000 is the UN Conciliation Commission’s Technical Committee estimate of refugees from Israel-controlled territory as at September 1949, a one-time cohort estimate its authors called only as accurate as circumstances permitted. UNRWA’s registration, reported by PASSIA at close to 5 million, counts people currently registered under the agency’s own eligibility rules across five jurisdictions, including descendants.

Which fertility rate is higher now, Israeli or Palestinian?

Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reported 2.89 children per woman for Israel in 2022. Palestinian fertility inputs reported by the Palestinian Bureau ran at 5.93 in 1999 with an official projection near 3.06 for 2025. The two series measure different territories and are not published on a common basis, so they are read as two trends rather than compared directly at a point.

Sources

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• Mahajna, Alaa, 2026. Annexation Through Law: Land Registration and Palestinian Dispossession in the West Bank. Arab Center Washington DC. Policy analysis.
• Morris, Benny, 2004. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press. Scholarly book.
• Okun, Barbara S., 2016. An investigation of the unexpectedly high fertility of secular, native-born Jews in Israel. Population Studies, 70(2), pp. 239 to 257. DOI 10.1080/00324728.2016.1195913. Peer-reviewed.
• Ozer, Bahar, Obaidi, Milan and Bergh, Robin, 2025. The Impact of Globalized Conflicts: Examining Attitudes Toward Jews Among Britons in the Political Context of the War in Gaza. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, Volume 107. DOI 10.1016/j.ijintrel.2025.102184. Peer-reviewed.
• Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, 2022. Population fact sheet. Organizational estimate.
• Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, 2014. Population fact sheet, reproducing UNRWA registration figures. Organizational relay.
• Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2018. Population, Housing and Establishments Census 2017 (final results). Ramallah. Official record.
• Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2021. Area, Population, and Population Density in Palestine by Governorate. Official record.
• Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. A Brief on the Status of the Palestinian People at the End of 2025. Ramallah. Official record.
• Pappé, Ilan, 2006. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld Publications. Scholarly book.
• Prime Minister’s Office of Israel, 2005. Summary of the Opinion Concerning Unauthorized Outposts, prepared by Talya Sason. Official record.
• Provisional Government of Israel, 1948. Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. Official Gazette Number 1, 14 May 1948. Knesset English text. Official record.
• Shenhav-Goldberg, Rachel, Brym, Robert and Lenton-Brym, Talia, 2019. Family Welfare Effort, Total Fertility, and In Vitro Fertilization: Explaining the Israeli Anomaly. Canadian Review of Sociology, 56(3), pp. 421 to 438. DOI 10.1111/cars.12255. Peer-reviewed.
• Staetsky, L. Daniel, 2019. Stalling Fertility Decline of Israeli Muslims and the Demographic Transition Theory. Population Studies, 73(3), pp. 317 to 333. DOI 10.1080/00324728.2019.1622765. Peer-reviewed.
• Sumour, M. A., El-Astal, A. H., Shabat, M. M. and Radwan, M. A., 2007. Simulation of Demographic Change in Palestinian Territories. arXiv:0705.4427. Preprint.
• United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, 1950. General Progress Report and Supplementary Report. UN General Assembly Official Records, document A/1367/Rev.1. Official record.
• UN-Habitat, 2019. Profile for the State of Palestine. Organizational report.
• WAFA (Palestinian news agency), 2022. Reporting on Palestinian population and refugee shares. Party’s own reporting.
• World Bank, 2024. World Development Indicators (West Bank and Gaza series). Official compiled series.
• Zimmerman, Bennett, Seid, Roberta and Wise, Michael L., 2006. The Million Person Gap: The Arab Population in the West Bank and Gaza. Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, Bar-Ilan University. Think-tank report, not peer-reviewed.