New figures released on Tuesday by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) on the anniversary of the Nakba paint a portrait not only of a people dispersed, but of land, water, homes, and movement steadily narrowed under occupation.
The bureau said the global Palestinian population has reached 15.5 million. About 7.4 million live in historical Palestine, while 8.1 million live in the diaspora, including 6.8 million in Arab countries.
This figure means that the number the number of Palestinians in Historic Palestine, including 2 million who hold Israeli citizenship in Israel proper and more than 5 million in the rest of the occupied Palestinian territories, is fast catching up with the number of Jews in the country, estimated at 7.5 million at the moment.
This is what Israel has deemed for sometime as a "demographic bomb" threatening the so-called "Jewish identity" of the country and partially explains the Zionist dream of expelling as many Palestinians as possible from the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Jerusalem.
By the end of 2025, roughly 5.6 million Palestinians are expected to reside in the occupied Palestinian territories: 3.43 million in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem and 2.13 million in the Gaza Strip.
But in Gaza, numbers no longer describe ordinary demography; rather, they measure survival.
Nearly two million Palestinians have been displaced inside the enclave since Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza began in October 2023. Families have been uprooted repeatedly as Israeli bombardments and evacuation orders pushed civilians from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, leaving many sheltering in overcrowded schools or makeshift tents amid collapsing infrastructure, hunger, and disease.
The statistics bureau said the scale of destruction has rendered much of Gaza “virtually uninhabitable.”
More than 198,000 buildings have been damaged since the war began, including over 102,000 destroyed entirely. Israel has partially damaged or completely destroyed at least 330,000 housing units in Gaza, more than 70 percent of the strip's total homes, according to the bureau.
Tel Aviv has also targeted schools, universities, hospitals, mosques, churches, and government facilities, alongside roads, sewage systems, agricultural land, water networks, and electricity infrastructure.
The bureau said average water availability in parts of Gaza has fallen to between three and five litres per person per day during periods of intense assault, far below the internationally recognized emergency minimum of 15 litres.
In the occupied West Bank, the report depicts a parallel process of territorial fragmentation through settlement expansion, land seizures, displacement, and restrictions on movement.
Israel has displaced over 40,000 Palestinians in the West Bank since October 2023, the majority of them from Jenin and Tulkarm.
By the end of 2025, the number of Israeli settlements and military sites in the West Bank had reached 645, according to the bureau. These include 151 settlements and 350 outposts, among them 89 pastoral outposts established on grazing land frequently used by Palestinian communities.
The settler population in the West Bank reached 778,567 by the end of 2024, the data showed.
Nearly 43 percent of settlers live in the Jerusalem governorate, where the ratio has risen to roughly 66 settlers for every 100 Palestinians. Across the West Bank overall, there are approximately 23 settlers for every 100 Palestinians.
The bureau said Israeli authorities seized more than 5,571 dunams of Palestinian land during 2025 through confiscation orders, expropriation measures, and declarations of “state land.”
It added that land exploited by settlers had expanded by more than 245 percent between 2000 and 2025, describing it as part of a broader policy aimed at consolidating Israeli control over Palestinian agricultural resources.
Additionally, Israeli authorities issued 991 demolition orders during 2025 and demolished or destroyed about 1,400 Palestinian structures during 2025, either fully or partially, according to the bureau.
In the Jerusalem governorate alone, 258 buildings and structures were demolished, including 104 cases in which Palestinian residents were forced to carry out the demolitions themselves to avoid steep Israeli fines and punitive fees.
The figures come as Israeli lawmakers push legislation that would formally scrap the Oslo Accords and nullify all agreements signed with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Palestinian Authority (PA). This would codify a reality already taking shape on the ground through settlement expansion, military incursions, and the fragmentation of Palestinian territorial continuity.
Violence by settlers and Israeli occupation forces has also intensified.
According to the bureau, more than 61,000 attacks were carried out by Israeli forces and settlers in the West Bank between 2022 and 2025. Those attacks included the uprooting, burning, or bulldozing of more than 81,500 trees, many of them centuries-old olive trees that anchor both livelihoods and memory in Palestinian rural life.
In the first three months of 2025 alone, more than 6,000 attacks targeting Palestinians, their property, and religious sites were documented, the bureau said.
Movement across the West Bank has become increasingly restricted through what the bureau described as nearly 900 military checkpoints and gates spread across Palestinian communities. The restrictions have cut farmers off from agricultural and grazing lands and deepened food insecurity amid worsening economic conditions.
The report also highlighted Israeli control over natural resources, particularly water.
According to the bureau, Israel controls more than 85 percent of Palestinian groundwater resources through restrictions on well drilling and rehabilitation, while it continues to deny Palestinians their rightful access to the Jordan River and the Dead Sea since 1967.
In occupied East Jerusalem, the bureau said residency revocations continue to function as another form of displacement.
Between 1967 and 2024, Israeli occupation authorities confiscated nearly 14,869 Jerusalem ID cards, according to the data. The bureau estimated that around 13,000 Palestinian families were affected, while approximately 65,000 Palestinians were barred from entering Jerusalem after residency rights belonging to heads of households were revoked.
The death toll since October 2023 has reached levels the bureau described as unprecedented since 1948, representing more than 50 percent of all those martyred since the Nakba.
It said Israel has killed more than 73,761 Palestinians between October 2023 and the end of April 2026, including 72,601 in Gaza and 1,160 in the West Bank.
Among those Israel killed in Gaza were more than 20,413 children and 12,524 women, in addition to thousands of medical workers, civil defence personnel, journalists, and educators.
For many Palestinians, the Nakba has long been described not as a single historical rupture in 1948, but as an ongoing condition, one measured now not only in exile, but in checkpoints, demolished homes, uprooted olive trees, and families displaced once again beneath canvas roofs.
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