Hamas wants more babies. Jews should too.
When jihadists talk demographics, the Jewish People ought to listen.
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After the Hamas-led barbaric attacks on October 7th and the war that followed, many young Israelis (religious and secular alike) suddenly decided they want to have more children.
Why?
Because they were reminded, in the most painful way, of a truth that history keeps teaching us: Jewish survival is not guaranteed. It must be earned — generation by generation, child by child.
This is not just a Jewish question. Across much of the developed world, fertility is in free fall. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average has plunged from nearly three children per woman in 1970 to 1.6 today — well below the 2.1 replacement level.
In Italy, Spain, and South Korea, birth rates are so low that populations will shrink by half within the lifetimes of today’s newborns. By the end of this century, global fertility may fall below 1.7.
But Israel is the great exception. The average Israeli woman has 2.9 children, nearly double that of her peers in Britain (1.6) or France (1.8). In fact, as one demographer joked, “If an Israeli woman has fewer than three children, she feels like she owes everyone an explanation — or an apology.”1
How did this happen?
When Israel declared independence in 1948, the fertility rate was 3.4. Perhaps young Israelis heeded the call of Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who urged women to “bring more Jewish children into the world” as an act of national revival.
But between 1960 and 1990, Israel’s fertility rate dipped to 2.6, before climbing back to 2.9 today. The Jewish state’s ultra-Orthodox community plays a major role; with a fertility rate of 6.6, they double their numbers every generation. The ultra-Orthodox are less than 20 percent of Israel’s population, but nearly 25 percent of children under 4 years old.
Still, it’s not just the ultra-Orthodox. Secular Jewish Israelis also have more children than the norm, despite working long hours, paying high childcare costs, and living in a country that does not offer especially generous parental leave.
Why? Scholars suggest several factors:
Strong family networks (83 percent of Israeli mothers get help from grandparents, compared to just 30 percent in Germany)
A culture that values family stability (less than 10 percent of Israeli babies are born out of wedlock, versus over 50 percent in England and France)
A pervasive sense of optimism (Israel consistently ranks among the happiest nations)
Perhaps most importantly, Israelis understand that having children is not just a private choice; it’s a national and civilizational one. After October 7th, many young couples began saying openly: “We need to bring more life into this world.” In a moment of profound insecurity, Israelis rediscovered the deepest truth about parenthood: Children are hope embodied.
By now it is common knowledge that children make up nearly half of Gaza’s population, at around 47 percent, among the two million people who live in the Strip. Comparatively, of all the Palestinians in the West Bank, 42 percent are children.
The Palestinian drive to have children stems from a vastly different motivation than the Israeli (Jewish) one — revealing the profound cultural divide between the two societies. One side views children as future doctors, teachers, builders of society. The other views children as future martyrs and human shields.
For instance, 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.”2
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.
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’s 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.
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: The role of women in Islamic society is to be the “maker of men.”
In addition to Hamas’ Islamist viewpoints, there is economic stimulus for the high fertility rate in Gaza: 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.
All of this brings us to the final reason why there are so many children in Gaza: “There have been statements from Hamas,” said Pedersen, “urging women to have more children to create a larger army.”
For most of human history, large families were both practical and necessary.
In agrarian societies, children were economic assets, such as working on farms and helping in family businesses.
But as economies urbanized and modernized, kids became costly investments rather than producers. Sociologist John Caldwell explained this shift as a move from “family morality” (children serve parents and kin) to “community morality” (parents pour resources into children for long-term productivity).
Today, in the West, children are widely viewed as lifestyle accessories — optional, expensive, often delayed or avoided altogether. In the Jewish world, this thinking is toxic. Because for Jews, the question of children is not about lifestyle; it’s about survival.
Our enemies understand this better than many of us do. Longtime Palestinian leader (and mega-terrorist) Yasser Arafat once said, “The womb of the Arab woman is my strongest weapon.” Jihadist movements like Hamas openly urge their people to have more children as a strategy of war. Iran’s leaders call on women to multiply for the sake of the Islamic Republic. Demographics is destiny, and they know it.
The Muslim population today is 1.8 billion and projected to grow by 70 percent by 2060. Even if only a small percentage embrace jihadist ideology, that still leaves tens of millions of Muslims who pose an existential threat to Western values and Jewish life.
Meanwhile, Jews (16 million worldwide) are barely holding steady. After the Holocaust wiped out one-third of our people, we should have learned the lesson: Numbers matter.
But this is not just about matching our enemies child for child; it’s about something nobler. Each Jewish child is not only a bearer of our past, but a builder of our future. The Torah commands us to: “Be fruitful and multiply.” The legendary Sephardic rabbi and philosopher Maimonides taught that the mitzvah of procreation is fulfilled with one boy and one girl. And he added:
“Those who are able should bring more souls into the world, for each soul is as if it built an entire world.”
Every child is a universe of possibility, another candle pushing back the darkness, a living declaration that Am Yisrael Chai — the Nation of Israel lives. The modern State of Israel was not just built by soldiers and politicians, but by parents who chose life in the shadow of death. Jewish children are laughter at Shabbat tables, voices in Jewish communities, inventors, artists, teachers, dreamers. They are the living answer to the question, “Will we survive?”
The very fact that the world feels uncertain is why we need more Jewish children, because they are the answer to our problems, because the future of our people (and perhaps the moral future of the world) depends on it.
The enemies of life will keep multiplying. The only answer is to multiply life even faster. To raise children rooted in our values, equipped with courage, animated by hope. To teach them that life is sacred, freedom is precious, and the Jewish story is theirs to continue.
For roughly 4,000 years, the Jewish story has continued because Jews believed in the future enough to create it. We should do the same today.
“In Israel, birth rates are converging between Jews and Muslims.” The Economist.
“The reasons why Gaza’s population is so young.” NewScientist.
Amen vamen. I worry about this issue here in the uk. The islamists can breed faster than the British......but back to Israel. She ain't going anywhere...that I'm confident in
‘The little children need somewhere to play.’ This was said after the terror attack here in London in 2005, by Muslim commentators invited to write for the British papers at the time. It is a deeply malevolent piece of coded speech which speaks Directly of The Muslim Brotherhood’s policy of seeding The West with Muslim immigrants with five-children anchor families to take the Land from under us using Demographics and numbers.