What it means to crowd two million people into 30% of the already tiny Gaza Strip

What does it mean to cram two million human beings into 30% of the Gaza Strip's already very small area?

It is a direct, deliberate decision of slow killing: forcing a population into so small a space that this tiny fragment becomes a small cell desperately overcrowded with prisoners.

The Gaza Strip covers 362 square kilometres and was home to 2.2 million people — already among the most densely populated places on earth, at an average of 6,000 people per square kilometre. Confining the population to 30% of it drives the rate to 18,000 per square kilometre — against 90 in Morocco, 125 in Egypt, 40 in the United States, 150 in densely populated China, 290 in Britain, 500 in India (the world's most populous country) and 400 in Belgium.

An immense human mass is being forced into a very small space without the minimum of public-health services or sewage treatment, without health, education or productive institutions — alongside tens of thousands of the wounded, above all children, those who have lost mobility, elderly women, and the thousands of widows who lost their providers in the war: vulnerable groups in urgent need of help even in ordinary times.

The occupied areas — especially around Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahia, Deir al-Balah and Rafah — are the agricultural lands, Gaza's food basket, holding its water wells, desalination plants and wastewater treatment works. These areas were Gaza's reserve for expansion.

Gaza's population grows by roughly 60,000 a year. In normal conditions the Strip needs sixty new schools a year, five hospitals, cemeteries, sports clubs and more — before even counting the need to rebuild the hundreds of schools and hospitals and tens of thousands of homes and factories the war destroyed.

There will be no land left to build schools, dig wells, raise greenhouses or social clubs — not even cemeteries for the dead. Before the war, many parts of Gaza already suffered a scarcity of land for cemeteries and schools. The land now under occupation (70%) is mostly government land — precisely the land eligible for building services: schools, universities, sports clubs, cemeteries, wells, sewage works, solar-energy projects. In my assessment the occupation government will never permit building cities for the population along the border areas it classed as buffer zones, where it allowed farmers only crops no taller than one metre. How would it now permit relatively tall buildings and a population density it regards as a danger to its security?

In 2012 a United Nations report projected that Gaza would be unliveable by 2020. What of its condition now, after all the war's destruction and ruin?

https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-195081

Occupying 70% of the very small Gaza Strip is not merely an occupation of land: it is a policy and a war of a new pattern — quieter, but with catastrophic results: displacement, slow death, the spread of disease, and the extinction of every means of living, even inside a narrow prison.