CAMERA’s Hebrew department recently prompted corrections in both English and Hebrew after the Israeli daily Haaretz erroneously repeated the false canard that the Gaza Strip is the world’s most densely populated place.
In their Aug. 13 article about the IDF’s preparations to take over Gaza City and what’s expected as a result, Yaniv Kubovich and Jack Khoury reported (“Guerilla Fighters, Densely Packed Buildings and 1.2 Million Residents: What Awaits Israeli Soldiers in Gaza City Takeover“):
The area allocated for civilians will extend east to the western part of Khan Yunis, with the IDF’s Morag corridor north of Rafah marking the southern boundary. This means that Gazans, already the inhabitants the most densely populated place in the world before October 7, 2023, will be packed into just 25 percent of the Strip. [Emphasis added].
It should be noted that Kubovich and Khoury’s claim was not that after the expected population evacuation the density in the Gaza Strip would be the highest in the world. Rather, they asserted that even before the outbreak of the war on October 7, 2023, the Gaza Strip was the most densely populated place in the entire world.
Yet, a glance at comparative statistics belies the falsehood. According to the CIA Factbook, the Gaza Strip in 2023 had a population of roughly 2,100,000 people in a territory of 360 km². Hence, with a population density of approximately 5,900 people per square kilometer (km²), it is markedly less densely populated that numerous countries and territories including Macau (22,000 people per km²), Monaco (19,000), Singapore (8,120), and Hong Kong (7,062).
Compared to the most densely populated cities around the world, which are inevitably more densely populated than entire countries or territories, the Gaza Strip compares favorably, with a lower population density.
A view of the Gaza Strip, 2015 (Photo by Al Mogheer shurrab, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Moreover, Gaza City, which is the target of the planned Israeli military operation discussed in Haaretz‘s article, is significantly more densely populated than the entire Gaza Strip, which includes agricultural land and other less densely populated areas. Yet, even the densely populated Gaza City itself is not “the most densely populated place in the world.”
Gaza City, with its population of 778,000 people in 2023 in an area of 45 km², has a population density of 17,288 per km², has a similar density to that of Kathmandu, Nepal, which is placed 50th in Yahoo’s list of the world’s most densely populated cities.
In addition, the Gaza Strip’s built-up urban areas, with an urban population of 1,851,000 (2023) in an area of 228 km2, has a population density of 8,121 people per km2, placing it 236th in the world according to Demographia’s list of built-up urban areas by population density (page 66).
Finally, as CAMERA’s Gilead Ini has pointed out, the Gaza Strip is not even the most densely populated location in the neighborhood. “Just a five-hour car ride from the Gaza Strip, for example, is the Cairo metropolitan area, where people are packed about twice as densely into an area larger than the Gaza Strip,” noted Ini.
In short, by any possible measure, neither before nor after Oct. 7, 2023, was the Gaza Strip the most densely populated place in the world.
Following CAMERA’s communication with Haaretz, editors promptly corrected the articles in both English and Hebrew. The new wording is:
The area allocated for civilians will extend east to the western part of Khan Yunis, with the IDF’s Morag corridor north of Rafah marking the southern boundary. This means that Gazans, already the inhabitants of one of the most densely populated places in the world before October 7, 2023, will be packed into just 25 percent of the Strip.
Contrary to common journalistic practice, editors did not append a note to the bottom of the article alerting readers to the change.
Other media outlets which previously corrected after misidentifying the Gaza Strip as the mostly densely populated place on earth include The San Diego Union-Tribune, Reuters, BBC Arabic,
For the Hebrew version of this article, please see Presspectiva.