News from the New Party

Number-crunching Gaza

Thanks to Stephen Pollard for highlighting this interesting piece of information:

The canard that Gaza is the most crowded place on earth continues to circulate.

The UK politician George Galloway wrote in The Glasgow Record last month that the Gaza Strip is "the most densely populated piece of earth on the planet." Galloway wrote that 1.5 million Palestinians live there.

Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian journalist currently teaching at Princeton, wrote March 26 that Gaza is "one of the most densely populated places on earth, with 3,823 people per square kilometre." Kuttab's figure is in line with recent Gaza population estimates of 1.4 million.

If Galloway's estimate of 1.5 million Gaza population is correct, this is almost 4,200 people per square kilometer. The Central Intelligence Agency projects that the Gaza population will reach 1,537,269 in July. This would bring the density to 4,270 people per square kilometer.

Both Singapore and Hong Kong have more than 6,000 people per square kilometer. Tel Aviv has more than 7,000 people per square kilometer. If you count the suburbs of Tel Aviv, the metropolitan area with its population of 2.3 million has a density of more than 5,000 people per square kilometer, which is considerably more crowded than the Gaza Strip as reckoned by Galloway or Kuttab or the CIA.

In other words, Gaza has a population density broadly similar to any large-ish urban area in the world, and rather lower than some highly successful jurisdictions (notably Singapore and Hong Kong).  Would that Gaza could become the Singapore of the Middle East.  Sadly, however, that is not going to happen while the territory is run by a bunch of islamist gangsters who regard Gaza as no more than a launch pad for missile and terror attacks on Israel, and the unfortunate civilian population as no more than human shields.