How have the Israeli and Palestinian populations grown, and why are the numbers disputed?

Palestinian population growth in the West Bank and Gaza

The West Bank and Gaza grew from about 2 million in 1990 to about 5.4 million today, almost entirely through natural increase, resting on the 1997, 2007 and 2017 censuses¹.

The growth record since 1948 to the present

Both populations grew severalfold: Jews in Israel from about 717,000 to over 10 million through immigration and high fertility (INED²); Palestinians from the roughly 711,000 displaced³ in the 1948 Nakba to a comparable number today. The statistics below trace that growth over time from 1948 to the present.

Why the 1948 refugee numbers are disputed

The Nakba count of roughly 711,000 refugees displaced is a mid-century estimate; the 5.6–5.7 million figures cited today are a UNRWA registry³ — a registry counts people still on file, including descendants, a different quantity from a count of people displaced. The dispute is largely about which number answers which question, not fraud.

Israeli demographic projections and the Jewish-Arab population balance

Israeli demographic projections for decades forecast a “demographic catastrophe” — a Jewish minority between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. Those projections aged badly: the Jewish population of the Land of Israel grew from 24,000 (5%) in 1900 to over 5.5 million (60%), while Palestinian fertility fell sharply — below 3 children per woman in the West Bank (CIA Factbook: 2.91). Counting all Palestinians, parity was reached around 6.58 million each⁴. So the Jewish-Arab balance is not a projected Jewish minority but an existing equal balance — one people governing an equal-size other.

The “inflated numbers” claim

Israeli advocates like Yoram Ettinger claimed Palestinian counts were inflated to “frighten Israelis⁵” into concessions. The one peer-reviewed audit found the alleged million-person gap was a product of how the figures were handled¹, not fraud (Lustick, 2013); demographers rebuilding the count from Israeli data (Zimmerman and DellaPergola, 2005) landed near the official figure. The “double-counting” of 300,000 East Jerusalem Palestinians is a definitional overlap both statistical offices share. When a government’s strongest argument against counting a people is that the count delegitimizes it, it is not the count that is inflated.