[richardfeynman]

Source on birth data is the un. You can Google it, they actually say 180 births per day in some documents, I'm using their figure.

Yes, conditions are bad in Gaza, and yes there have been many deaths, but it's not a genocide if the population is rising.

[konmok]

No, I really can't find any documents like that. Could you post a URL to the document you're referring to? Additionally, your claim of 60,000 deaths is an extreme underestimate. The dataset provided by data.techforpalestine.org lists more than 60,000 deaths, despite only including people whose corpses could be identified and directly linked to an Israeli attack. In other words, this does not include deaths from starvation, exposure, or illness. It also does not include unconfirmed deaths, and, of course, cannot include unreported deaths.

You may think data.techforpalestine.org is a biased source, but their total identified death count roughly agrees with every other source I could find.

[anatoly]

It's hard to get good data on current birth rates in Gaza, but the recently published preprint of a demographic study of the death toll in Gaza (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.19.25329797v...) provides some evidence that the death toll in Gaza is approximately balanced by births. Specifically, the project directed in-person interviews of Gazan citizens representing ~2k households and ~9k people in them, and recorded ~390 violent deaths and ~360 births in that cohort, both from 10/7 and until January 2025.

[konmok]

Thank you for providing a source! That data certainly contradicts @richardfeynman's claim, in that it suggests a shrinking population. Additionally, since total deaths will be greatly in excess of violent deaths, I would say it suggests a rapidly shrinking population. I would not call the birth and death rates "approximately balanced" in this case, but I suppose that's a matter of opinion.

[anatoly]

No, this data in fact suggests growing population, for the following three reasons:

- the survey recorded a surprisingly small excess of nonviolent deaths (in excess of what's demographically expected), this is discussed in the preprint. The much larger number of violent deaths is almost matched by births, so the total balance is somewhat towards shrinking, in that cohort

- however, it is well known that the violent deaths occurred overwhelmingly early in the war (so far) - according to the official Hamas statistics, something like 50% of all casualties are in the first 4 months of the war, out of 22 so far. Whether these statistics are over- or under-counted is not likely to make a dent in this huge imbalance. So as the war is ongoing - and it's already been another 8 months since the 14 covered by the survey - the death rate is still "collapsing" compared to average rate so far.

- at the same time, the birth rate has evidently not seen such a huge collapse since the first 4 months of the war; this can't be gleaned from the survey, but enough plausible reports (e.g. what @richardfeynman quoted) exist that point in that direction.

So if we consider the survey relatively representative of the entire population, the imbalance towards shrinking population after 14 months is already almost certainly repaired towards growing after another 8 months, because so few civilians are violently killed (again, compared to the first 4 months of the war) in 2025.

[konmok]

Once again: do you have sources for any of this? Yes, there were more violent deaths at the start of the war, but how much more? @richardfeynman did provide quotes for his birth rate claims, but as I already mentioned, those quotes appear to be estimates of birth rates for a single month. Extrapolating that data across all 22 months is nonsense.

Additionally, your argument hinges on a single preprint paper that has yet to be peer-reviewed.

And finally, we don't even need to play these games counting up death tolls in different, increasingly creative ways. There are already reports from the UN and others directly confirming that Gaza's population has decreased: <https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/dec/06/instagram-...>

[anatoly]

The time-wise imbalance of deaths is a very basic fact about the ongoing war, I didn't realize you were ignorant of it and needed a verification. The Hamas-provided statistics are timestamped, you can look e.g. at https://data.techforpalestine.org/docs/casualties-daily/, download the CSV file, look in the cumulative deaths column, see that it's just over 60k for the entire period, and note that 30k occurs around 2024-03-01. So I was slightly off and it's a little less than 5 months (oct 07 to mar 01) out of a little less than 23 months (oct 07 to 2025-08-31) that account for 50% of the deaths.

There isn't any report that actually counts Gaza's population, the UN provided an "estimate" with no methodology, births are not mentioned, and it's built on figures including number of people who exited Gaza (irrelevant to the claimed decrease due to violent deaths). That's not serious.

There's no coherent notion of genocide that fails to reduce the population significantly. Yes, you can argue (and people have) that the legal definition, by using the "part of" wording, can conceivably apply to virtually any number of deaths, but again, that's not serious.

[richardfeynman]

Source: https://www.who.int/news/item/03-11-2023-women-and-newborns-... "There are an estimated 50 000 pregnant women in Gaza, with more than 180 giving birth every day. " - WHO

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_humanitarian_crisis_%2820...

"On 18 January 2024, Natalia Kanem, the executive director of the UN Population Fund, spoke at the World Economic Forum at Davos, stating the situation was the "worst nightmare" the UNPF representative had ever witnessed, as there were 180 women giving birth daily, sometimes on the streets of Gaza, as the territory's health system collapsed"

Source: https://www.savethechildren.net/news/about-130-children-born... "About 130 babies will be born in Gaza every day over a month into a healthcare system driven to the verge of collapse, where some may not survive complications at birth. "

The 60k death count is likely an overcount, not an undercount, but this one I won't google for you. However you cut the numbers, and even if you believe in nameless ghosts under the rubble, there's been no population collapse.

[konmok]

Thanks for providing sources! They estimate 180 giving birth every day, but over what time frame? Without a time frame, it's not really possible to estimate the total born.

As for the 60k count, every single source I have found suggests that 60k is a massive underestimate. You'll need to provide some very strong evidence to back up your claim to the contrary.

Regardless of the balance of birth and death rates, multiple sources have reported a significant decline in Gaza's population this year. So far, all evidence you have provided contradicts your own initial claim.

[richardfeynman]

Excuse me, but my initial claim is that there is no genocide in gaza because there is no massive population collapse. During the holocaust, 66% of european jewry was murdered in a systematic effort -- all civilians, with no Jews attacking European cities. The figures during the rwandan and armenian genocide were similar: massive population collapses.

Whether you believe there have been 100 births a day or 140 or 150 or 180, I have demonstrated that there were tens of thousands of births during the war in gaza, using credible sources like the UNOCHA and WHO. But even if you assume ZERO births, the gazan population will have only collapsed by roughly 60k people. I may be wrong about this, but I think this is an OVERESTIMATE, not an underestimate. While you don't have to believe me, I at least can make this claim without appealing to nameless ghosts under the rubble and can provide credible sources.

- The hamas figures are not an independent registry. The numbers are produced by a Hamas-run Ministry of Health—i.e., a belligerent party—without external audit. The UN, etc. do not independently verify these numbers; they simply repeat them. Even sympathetic explainers acknowledge the ministry is governed by Hamas and its routine updates aren’t independently verified.

- The system accepts public self-reports (initially via Google Forms, later an MoH web portal). That alone invites duplicates, misclassification, and bad data. Washington Institute documents the Google Form; it also cites the current MoH “report a death/missing” portal.

- The public reporting portal explicitly allows “natural death” submissions. When the same pipeline feeds the headline tally, non-combat, non-IDF deaths can (and did) get swept in. The live MoH form literally offers “martyr,” “missing,” or “natural death.” Mainstream reporting later noted removals where entries turned out to be natural deaths.

- the gaza ministry of health uses opaque and unreliable methods to count deaths (“media reports” + family notifications) with weak validation. Beyond hospital records, the MoH has relied on poorly specified “media reports” and family submissions; AP also notes names often come via the Hamas government media office—not hospital documentation. That’s not a chain of custody you can audit. It included the known false figures from the al ahli hospital incident.

- Totals and demographics are unstable and there have big retroactive corrections. The UN/OCHA famously halved its women/children figures in May 2024, and months later the MoH removed thousands of previously listed “victims,” with officials conceding some were natural deaths or living detainees. That volatility is incompatible with “hard” totals.

- The overall figure doesn’t separate civilians from combatants or assign cause of death. By design it bundles Hamas fighters, civilians, misfire casualties, indirect war deaths, and (as above) even natural deaths—so it cannot answer the key question “how many Gazans were killed by Israel.”

Sources: Source: https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/untangli...

Source: https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/sites/default/files/pdf/...

Source: https://sehatty.ps/moh-registration/public/add-order

Source: https://news.sky.com/story/hundreds-of-names-removed-from-of...

Source: https://www.euronews.com/2025/04/03/hamas-run-health-ministr...

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/un-says-gaza-death...

Source: https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-gaza-health-mini...