[anatoly]

No, this data in fact suggests growing population, for the following three reasons:

- the survey recorded a surprisingly small excess of nonviolent deaths (in excess of what's demographically expected), this is discussed in the preprint. The much larger number of violent deaths is almost matched by births, so the total balance is somewhat towards shrinking, in that cohort

- however, it is well known that the violent deaths occurred overwhelmingly early in the war (so far) - according to the official Hamas statistics, something like 50% of all casualties are in the first 4 months of the war, out of 22 so far. Whether these statistics are over- or under-counted is not likely to make a dent in this huge imbalance. So as the war is ongoing - and it's already been another 8 months since the 14 covered by the survey - the death rate is still "collapsing" compared to average rate so far.

- at the same time, the birth rate has evidently not seen such a huge collapse since the first 4 months of the war; this can't be gleaned from the survey, but enough plausible reports (e.g. what @richardfeynman quoted) exist that point in that direction.

So if we consider the survey relatively representative of the entire population, the imbalance towards shrinking population after 14 months is already almost certainly repaired towards growing after another 8 months, because so few civilians are violently killed (again, compared to the first 4 months of the war) in 2025.

[konmok]

Once again: do you have sources for any of this? Yes, there were more violent deaths at the start of the war, but how much more? @richardfeynman did provide quotes for his birth rate claims, but as I already mentioned, those quotes appear to be estimates of birth rates for a single month. Extrapolating that data across all 22 months is nonsense.

Additionally, your argument hinges on a single preprint paper that has yet to be peer-reviewed.

And finally, we don't even need to play these games counting up death tolls in different, increasingly creative ways. There are already reports from the UN and others directly confirming that Gaza's population has decreased: <https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/dec/06/instagram-...>

[anatoly]

The time-wise imbalance of deaths is a very basic fact about the ongoing war, I didn't realize you were ignorant of it and needed a verification. The Hamas-provided statistics are timestamped, you can look e.g. at https://data.techforpalestine.org/docs/casualties-daily/, download the CSV file, look in the cumulative deaths column, see that it's just over 60k for the entire period, and note that 30k occurs around 2024-03-01. So I was slightly off and it's a little less than 5 months (oct 07 to mar 01) out of a little less than 23 months (oct 07 to 2025-08-31) that account for 50% of the deaths.

There isn't any report that actually counts Gaza's population, the UN provided an "estimate" with no methodology, births are not mentioned, and it's built on figures including number of people who exited Gaza (irrelevant to the claimed decrease due to violent deaths). That's not serious.

There's no coherent notion of genocide that fails to reduce the population significantly. Yes, you can argue (and people have) that the legal definition, by using the "part of" wording, can conceivably apply to virtually any number of deaths, but again, that's not serious.