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Stephen Pollard

ByStephen Pollard, Stephen Pollard

Opinion

Gaza is not too crowded

April 24, 2008 24:00
1 min read

There's a useful corrective here to the lie that Gaza is the most crowded place on Earth: 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. But this isn't even as crowded as Tel Aviv. Gaza had plenty of problems. But they are nothing - nothing - to do with population density: