Only a handful of wealthy city-states are more densely populated than the Gaza Strip.
With some 2.3 million habitual residents crammed into a 25-mile long and 6-mile wide slither of territory between a fence with Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea – it is home to over 16,300 residents per square mile.
In this sense, it comes as little surprise that the week-long unrelenting Israeli bombing of the enclave has resulted in the death of over 2,300 Palestinians, according to its health ministry.
The situation is likely, however, to get far worse in the coming days. On Thursday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) ordered the evacuation of the 1.1 million people living in Gaza City and the surrounding north, where they believed Hamas fighters were hiding and holding hostages.
With border crossings closed, the UN on Sunday claimed the move was pushing the people of Palestine “into an abyss”.
Before the events of the past week, the Gaza Strip was about as crowded as Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, and roughly 25 percent more so than London.
Among self-governing territories, only Monaco, Macao, Singapore and Hong Kong had higher population densities.
Forced south of the Wadi Gaza, the Palestinians’ land has gone from 141 to 90 square miles – a reduction of 36 percent.
In dire conditions – with the supply of electricity, water and food cut off – population density is set to rise to 25,600, closer to that of Egypt’s Cairo or India’s Bangalore, some of the most packed places on the planet.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Israel’s demand would spark a “humanitarian catastrophe” on Friday.
He said: “Moving more than one million people across a densely populated warzone to a place with no food, water, or accommodation, when the entire territory is under siege, is extremely dangerous – and in some cases, simply not possible.”
Most of the Strip’s hospitals, the majority of which are full of air raid casualties, are in the north. A Saturday statement from the World Health Organisation (WHO) claimed the directive to move patients to the south could be “tantamount to a death sentence”.
A full-scale invasion has seemed inevitable for days, as hundreds of thousands of troops and tanks amassed near the Iron Wall that failed to prevent Hamas’s brutal attack last weekend.
Such an escalation is now imminent, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared “the next stage is coming” and an IDF statement said they were preparing for an assault “from the air, sea and land”.
