78 years after the Nakba: 15.5 million Palestinians worldwide and a deep wound in Gaza
Palestinians around the world will commemorate next Thursday the 78th anniversary of the Nakba, amid ongoing suffering in the Gaza Strip.
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics states that “there are 15.5 million Palestinians worldwide at the end of 2025, including 7.4 million in historic Palestine and 8.1 million in the diaspora, among whom 6.8 million live in Arab countries.”
It adds: “Of the total number of Palestinians, about 5.6 million live in the State of Palestine at the end of 2025, including 3.43 million in the West Bank and 2.13 million in the Gaza Strip.”
Meanwhile, 1.8 million Palestinians live in Israel.
According to the Bureau of Statistics, Palestinian society is a young society: the proportion of individuals aged 0–17 reaches 43% in 2025, while the average age stands at 21.6 years.
It noted that “the literacy rate among individuals aged 15 years and above reached 97.9% in 2023, higher than the global and Arab averages of 88% and 89% respectively.”
It added: “The net enrollment rate in basic education in the West Bank approached 100% during the 2024–2025 academic year, the same rate recorded in the Gaza Strip before October 7, 2023.”
It also indicated that “67.8% of those enrolled in higher education are female.”
In a notable statistic, the number of physicians in Palestine reached 28 doctors per 10,000 inhabitants in 2022, exceeding the global average of around 17 doctors, according to the same report.
The density of nursing staff in Palestine reached approximately 4.4 nurses per 1,000 inhabitants, a figure far exceeding the minimum recommended by the World Health Organization, set at 2.5 health workers per 1,000 inhabitants.
Gaza: a renewed Nakba
In Gaza, residents have been repeatedly forced to flee their homes under duress, becoming displaced in tents and schools, trapped between the walls of poverty and war.
Approximately two million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes, out of about 2.2 million who were living in the enclave on the eve of the war in autumn 2023, in addition to the “forced displacement of about 40,000 Palestinians in camps in the northern West Bank due to ongoing assaults by the Israeli army,” according to the Bureau of Statistics.
Since the beginning of the war on Gaza on October 7, 2023, the Israeli army has destroyed at least 330,000 housing units, either fully or partially, accounting for more than 70% of the housing stock in the Gaza Strip, in addition to the destruction of schools, universities, hospitals, mosques, churches, government buildings, thousands of economic facilities, and various infrastructure components including roads, water, electricity, and sewage networks, as well as agricultural lands, rendering the Gaza Strip uninhabitable.
In the West Bank, the Israeli army carried out the demolition and destruction of around 1,400 buildings in 2025, either fully or partially, including 258 buildings and facilities in the Jerusalem governorate.
Among these were 104 cases of forced self-demolition in Jerusalem, in which Palestinians are compelled to demolish their own homes.
According to the same data, there are 151 settlements and 350 outposts in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
There are also 778,567 settlers in the West Bank and Jerusalem, including 243,716 in East Jerusalem.
