The Real Reasons Behind Gaza's Massive Child Population
Against the backdrop of the Israel-Hamas war, it is well-known that children make up nearly half of Gaza’s population. The reasons why might surprise you.
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In a dramatic shift, this week the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has revised its data pertaining to the number of Palestinian casualties in the seven-month-old Gaza war, reducing almost by half the number of women and children it previously said were killed in the hostilities between Israel and the Iranian-backed terror group Hamas.
Children make up nearly half of Gaza’s population, at around 47 percent, among the two million people who live in the Strip.
Comparatively, Palestinians in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank) are 42-percent children.1 Palestinians in Gaza, however, are believed to be much more religious (Sunni Muslims) than their West Bank counterparts.
“We have to understand that Hamas are very religious people,” said Kobi Michael, a leading Israeli expert on Palestinian issues. “They are very determined, radical, and extreme, and therefore, it is very hard for Western people to understand that they believe that they will be able to collapse the State of Israel. But this is what they believe.”2
Many people seem to think that “the majority of Palestinians” do not support Hamas, but a recent survey taken by an esteemed Palestinian pollster found that 72-percent of Palestinians think Hamas is not generating enough terrorism against Israel, and that they support more armed resistance against the Jewish state.3
Interestingly enough, Palestinian violence and children evidently go hand-in-hand. During the First Intifada (a violent Palestinian uprising against Israel), which began in 1987, research found a surge in marriage and fertility rates across Gaza.
“Palestinian women are not having lots of children because they don’t know about contraception, or can’t access contraception,” said Sara Randall, an anthropologist at University College London, who co-authored the research. “So one has to conclude that they actually want lots of children.”4
Randall’s study, which involved interviews with more than 16,000 Gaza women in Gaza, concluded that the First Intifada was a key driving factor for the surge in marriage and fertility. In 1989 and 1990, for example, women were 1.4 times more likely to marry than in 1980.
The fertility rate was even higher, twice that in 1980, resulting in 8.3 children per woman. Since then, it has dropped to 4.4 children per woman in 2014, and again to 3.4 in 2023, which is still among the world’s highest.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, this puts the population growth rate in Gaza at four percent per year, also among the world’s highest.
“Whether the phenomenally high fertility levels in Gaza are also a more long-term response to political oppression and a perceived need to increase the numbers of Palestinians cannot be inferred from the data available, but it certainly seems to be a plausible hypothesis,” according to Randall’s study.
One of the outcomes of Gaza’s incredibly high fertility rate is that the Strip has one of the lowest percentages of women in the labor market, at less than 15 percent. It is a place in the world where the least amount of women work outside the home, compared to Scandinavian countries which have a 70-to-80 percent female employment rate.
“In a situation where disempowerment, underemployment, and marginalization have left few opportunities for expression of identity, reproduction is one of the few liberties which remains, and also contributes to the larger goal of increasing the Palestinian people,” Randall’s study said.
The question is: Who exactly is oppressing, disempowering, under-employing, and marginalizing women in Gaza?
Many people will fault the Israelis — of course, the Jews are almost always to blame for everyone else’s problems, right? But the State of Israel dismantled all Jewish settlements there in 2005.
A dozen years earlier, in 1993, the State of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the Oslo Accords, which called for Palestinian administration of the Gaza Strip. Israeli forces immediately withdrew from the enclave, leaving a new Palestinian National Authority to administer and police it.5
So, are the Israelis to blame for the aforementioned oppression, disempowerment, underemployment, and marginalization? Or is there something more nuanced at play here?
In the 1960s, Gaza as an Islamic society began to take shape. The Strip was under Egyptian jurisdiction, but this changed after Egypt once again blocked Israeli ships from using the Straits of Tiran, leading to the 1967 Six-Day War, which in turn led to Israel taking over Gaza.
Meanwhile, in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt, but remained a fringe group in politics across the Arab world. After a resounding Arab defeat by Israel against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in the Six-Day War, Islamic fundamentalism started to replace the popularity of secular Arab nationalism.
Following the war, Gaza’s iterations of the Muslim Brotherhood did not actively participate in armed resistance against Israel, preferring to focus on social-religious reform and the restoration of Islamic values.
This outlook changed in early-1980s Gaza, and Islamic organizations became more involved in Palestinian politics, led by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a Palestinian refugee from an Arab village called Al-Jura (eight kilometers west of Jerusalem).
Of humble origins and quadriplegic, Yassin persevered to become one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s leaders in Gaza. His charisma and conviction brought him a loyal group of followers, upon whom he, as a quadriplegic, depended for everything — from feeding him, to transporting him to and from events, to communicating his plans to the public.
In 1984, Yassin was arrested after the Israelis found out that his group collected arms, but they released him in 1985 as part of a prisoner exchange. That’s when he set up al-Majd, headed by former student leader Yahya Sinwar (the current Gaza Strip leader of Hamas) and Rawhi Mushtaha. They were tasked with handling internal security and hunting local informants for Israeli intelligence services.
At about the same time, he ordered former student leader Salah Shehade to set up al-Mujahidun al-Filastiniun (a Palestinian fighters group), but its militants were quickly rounded up by Israeli authorities and their arms were confiscated.
The idea of Hamas began to take form in late 1987, when several members of the Muslim Brotherhood convened the day after an incident in which an Israeli army truck had crashed into a car at a Gaza checkpoint, killing four Palestinian day-workers. They met at Yassin’s house and decided that they too needed to react in some manner, as protest riots sparking the First Intifada erupted.
A leaflet issued in December 1987 — calling for resistance — is considered to mark Hamas’ first public intervention, though the name Hamas itself was not used until 1988.
To many Palestinians, Hamas appeared to engage more authentically with their national aspirations, since it provided an Islamic version of what had been the Palestine Liberation Organization’s original goals: armed struggle to liberate all of Palestine (“from the river to the sea”), rather than territorial compromises to which the PLO acquiesced.
Creating Hamas as an entity distinct from the Muslim Brotherhood was a matter of practicality; the Muslim Brotherhood refused to engage in violence against Israel, but without participating in the First Intifada, the Islamists tied to it feared they would lose support to their rivals, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the PLO. They also hoped that, by keeping its militant activities separate, Israel would not interfere with its social work.
In 1988, Hamas published its official charter, wherein it defined itself as a chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood and its desire to establish “an Islamic state throughout Palestine.” This charter includes declarations like:
Hamas is an Islamic Resistance Movement with an ideological program of Islam.
Its roots and connections are to Salafism (Sunni Muslim) and the Muslim brotherhood, respectively, with Islam as its official religion and the Qur’an as its constitution.
Hamas is one of the links in the chain of the struggle against the Zionist invaders and references a hadith (Islamic commandment) which states that the Day of Judgment would not come until the Muslims fight and kill the Jews.
Allah is Hamas’ goal, the Prophet is the model, the Qur’an its constitution, jihad its path, and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.
There is no negotiated settlement possible. Jihad is the only answer.
The role of women in Islamic society is to be the “maker of men.”
There you have it: The nature of the woman’s role in fundamentalist Islam — and, by extension, in Gaza — is clearly spelled out for us, and could very well explain why Palestinian women there have so many children.
A University of Oslo research paper about the role of Muslim women in Islamic society corroborated this perspective, saying:
“The woman is a mother and it is said that ‘paradise lies under her feet,’ reported Al Tabarani (an ancient Sunni scholar and jurist). Women make up half of society and they are responsible for the nurturing, guidance and reformation of the subsequent generations of men and women.”6
According to the same research paper, there is also an authentic hadith (Islamic commandment) in which the Prophet Muhammad was asked by a man:
“‘Who is the one most worthy of my care?’ The Prophet replied: ‘Your mother.’ The man asked: ‘Then whom?’ He replied: ‘Your mother.’ The man further asked: ‘Then whom?’ He replied: ‘Your mother.’ The man asked: ‘Then whom?’ And in this fourth time the Prophet replied: ‘Then your father.’ This shows that Allah has placed the care of the mother as a primary responsibility of her sons.”
In addition to Hamas’ theological viewpoints, there is economic stimulus for the high fertility rate: While women are housebound, their husbands earn more money as their families expand. Employers in Gaza “are willing to pay it,” according to Jon Pedersen of the Fafo Institute, a center for demographic and social research in Norway. “Traditionally, men will get extra wages if they have extra children,” he said.
As for the children, more than 95 percent of them aged 6 to 12 attend school, and we know that Palestinians learn to nurture hatred and glorify violence in schools (including among those administered by the United Nations, believe it or not).
Just this year, an investigation into Gaza teaching materials found antisemitic incitement in schools run by the UN Relief and Works Agency. What’s more, many of the teachers employed there also make openly antisemitic statements, glorify Hitler, and cheer the murder of Jews.7
An example of a fourth-grade Palestinian math problem is: “The number of martyrs in the First Intifada was 2,026 martyrs. And the number of martyrs in the Al-Aqsa Intifada was 5,050 martyrs. The number of martyrs in the two intifadas is how many martyrs?”
A seventh-grade Palestinian physics problem, based on Newton’s Second Law of Motion, asks: “During the first Palestinian uprising, youths used slingshots to confront the soldiers of the Zionist occupation and defend themselves from treacherous bullets. What’s the relationship between the elongation of the slingshots, the rubber, and the tensile strength affecting it?”
Fundamentalist Muslims do not just oppose Israel. They have called the Jewish state things like a “sinister, unclean rabid dog of the region” whose leaders “look like beasts and cannot be called human.”8
In Gaza, Muslim preachers regularly spew nauseating antisemitism, such as one who said: “Our doctrine in fighting the Jews is that we will totally exterminate them. We will not leave a single one of them alive, because they are alien usurpers of the land and eternal mercenaries.”9
At “summer camps” they teach kids how to fire automatic weapons and kidnap Israelis. And as these children become young adults, Hamas literally incentivizes terrorism against Israelis. That’s right, if you commit a terror attack against Israelis and are jailed for it in Israel, you’ll receive a monthly salary from one of these Palestinian governments, and your family will also receive monthly stipends.
“Hamas and its co-conspirators in the Muslim world constructed an entire architecture of antisemitism that spanned the world and spanned spheres from academia to religion, politics, and culture,” according to a Time magazine exposé about the hate that drove the Palestinians’ October 7th attacks in Israel.10
The “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and other timeless hateful publications are translated into Arabic and updated with “new additions” — to the point that a healthy majority of the public is thoroughly convinced “Zionists” are pure filth who ought to be unsoiled from “Palestine.”
All of this brings us to the final reason why there are so many children in Gaza: “There have been statements from Hamas,” Jon Pedersen said, “urging women to have more children to create a larger army.”
“Children make up nearly half of Gaza's population. Here’s what it means for the war.” NPR.
Bergen, Peter. “Analyst: Israel’s costly misunderstanding of Hamas’ true aims.” CNN. October 16, 2023.
Oren, Michael. “Why the Body Cams?” Clarity with Michael Oren. Substack.
“The reasons why Gaza’s population is so young.” NewScientist.
Ring, Trudy; Salkin, Robert M.; Schellinger, Paul E. (1994). International Dictionary of Historic Places. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-1-884964-03-9.
“The Role of Muslim Women in an Islamic Society.” University of Oslo.
“BILD on UNRWA: ‘Germany pays for hatred of Jews in Palestinian schools.’” UN Watch.
Brooks, David. “How to Fight Anti-Semitism.” The New York Times.
“Gaza imam calls for Jews’ extermination.” The Times of Israel.
“Let’s Be Honest About the Hate That Drove the Hamas Attack.” Time.
The degree to which Arab leaders have exploited and weaponized their own children is almost incomprehensible to Westerners. In fact, it's so unbelievable, most people refuse to believe it.
For me, the biggest surprise here was the 7th grade physics problem. I doubt most college freshmen in the USA would be able to answer it. Imagine if the young, evidently well-educated population of Gaza were allowed to direct its energies towards something other than an endless quest to murder its neighbors.
Hamas is Nazism 2024 style