Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics' population estimates, as of July 2025 - down 6% in one year since 2024, which is 10% below original forecasts for 2025:
You are confusing emigration with death. We are not concerned with who is physically in Gaza, we are concerned with births and deaths.
There are less people physically in Gaza now because a bunch of people emigrated. Not because of deaths.
The overall group of families who lived in Gaza on Oct 7 2023 is about the same number of humans now. A few hundred thousand have emigrated. About 40-60k were killed. About 50k were born.
Actually a few hundred thousand have been killed, the ~60k figure from the Gaza health ministry is just the deaths they've been able to actually confirm, which is just deaths at hospitals (which is why that number has grown so little this year, because the vast majority of hospitals in Gaza have been destroyed by the IDF).
Sure, they're estimates not proven statistics, but the situation on the ground means it's impossible for anyone to have an accurate count. What's important is that we don't look at the relatively small (yet still depressingly large) number of confirmed deaths of known named people, tracked by the Gaza health ministry, as if it's a count of the actual number of deaths. Hell, even the IDF recently claimed that there have been 90k deaths (when they were boasting that they had killed 30k Hamas fighters and that they had "only" killed 2 civilians to every 1 Hamas) - and, setting aside the IDF's track record of lying and their incentive to claim less civilian deaths than reality, even if they were telling the truth that would still be limited to deaths they were actually able to track and confirm, not the many other deaths that weren't officially recorded.
Fact checking services debunking the claim of population not shrinking since October 2023:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/dec/06/instagram-...
https://www.aap.com.au/factcheck/gaza-population-growth-proj...
Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics' population estimates, as of July 2025 - down 6% in one year since 2024, which is 10% below original forecasts for 2025:
https://www.pcbs.gov.ps/portals/_pcbs/PressRelease/Press_En_... (3rd section of page 2; though the whole document is worth reading)