The phenomenon of the Gaza Strip: women give birth non-stop for the sake of Hamas

The Gaza Strip, where Hamas is headquartered, is the focus of the entire world’s attention today. A piece of land several tens of kilometers long – without industry, without economy, without education, without medicine, separated from prosperous Israel by an iron fence around the perimeter.

And yet there is something here that many supporters of traditional values, for example, would like to strive for. This is fertility. One of the highest, if not the highest, in the world.

No demographic crisis. No catastrophe with childbearing. Despite the complete bottom in which, let’s be honest, live Palestinian refugees and their descendants, who make up the majority of the population of Gaza.

We found out what causes such fertility and whether this method is suitable for those countries that are currently experiencing a deep demographic crisis.

Every twenty-five years, Gaza’s population doubles. Over 40% of the residents are teenagers. Today, one woman of childbearing age has 3.6 children, more than enough for reproduction.

The CIA estimated that 1,918,221 people lived in this tiny territory as of July 2020. Just think about it! They literally sat on each other’s heads.

Combined with poverty and the absence of at least some kind of adequate future, normal work and the constant brainwashing of radical Islamists, for whom life is a penny and is worth nothing, and after death, in holy jihad, you will go to heaven – in fact, this is an explosive mixture. And next to us is the main enemy Israel, which lives well, which is why we “live poorly.”

But at the same time, unfortunately, there is a third component that traditionalists cannot get rid of. They believe that everyone around them is obliged to live the way they do, but at the same time they cannot build a normal life for their own citizens. They don’t really fight for the same infant life here. And not only because of bad medicine.

Newborns in the Gaza Strip die at a much higher rate than in first world countries, with 14.9 deaths per 1,000 live in 2020. In Russia there are 4.5 child deaths per 1000, in Israel -2.2.

“Women in Gaza are having a lot of babies because they don’t know about contraception or can’t access it,” explained Sarah Randall, an anthropologist at University College London who has co-authored a major study on the region. The scientist made a paradoxical conclusion: if women resign themselves to the fate that is in store for them, do not become indignant or protest, then “they actually want a lot of children.” I wonder what other options they have?

Yes, such a high birth rate is due to the position of women in traditional Islamic society. Complete dependence on men and lack of work even with education.

“Gaza is the place in the world where the fewest women work outside the home,” says John Pedersen of the Fafo Institute, a demographic and social research center in Oslo, Norway. Data from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics shows that less than 15 percent of women are employed in the labor market.

“In most other countries this figure is much higher, for example in Scandinavia – from 70 to 80 percent,” Pedersen explained.

Even in other Middle Eastern countries with similar cultures to Gaza, the proportion of women in the workforce is significantly higher. In Jordan, for example. It’s probably only worse in Afghanistan, where representatives of the fairer sex are not considered people at all.

Moreover, in 1991, per fertile woman, a record 8.1 children were born in her lifetime. At that time, the Gaza Strip was subsidized by humanitarian organizations, they brought them food, medicine, vaccines, hoping to somehow convince them that there was another life, but it was useless. The Palestinians accepted help, but did not become different; not only, as it now turns out, they also hated those who helped them.

It is not only impossible for women to work, but also unprofitable. Traditionally, men in Gaza, according to the same study, receive higher salaries if they have many children. The more they give birth, the more they get. True, unemployment in Gaza is still about 40%, so even an increase here won’t make much difference. But no one strives for this, and why?

As a result, most families in Gaza get by on little because they do not have to provide a future for their children. It is predetermined from birth.

Experts believe that in most civilized countries, fertility rates tend to fall hand in hand with improvements in education and career opportunities for women, but the situation in Gaza categorically does not correspond to the “second demographic transition” model.

Another factor that contributed to the sharp increase in the birth rate is patriotism.

During the Palestinian uprising, the Intifada, which began in 1987, there was a sharp jump in marriage rates, with many educated Palestinian women willing to marry men much less educated than themselves, recognizing that future children would be more likely to continue their fathers’ lifestyle.

Rendell’s research, which included interviews with 16,204 Gazan women and 4,900 Jordanian women, found that the liberation struggle was a key driver behind the rise in marriage and birth rates.

“Whether the phenomenally high birth rate in Gaza is a response to a perceived political need to increase the Palestinian population cannot be inferred from the available data, but it certainly seems a plausible hypothesis,” Randell concludes the study.

Pedersen believes that the sense of duty to increase the population was a factor that cannot be discounted. “There have been Hamas statements calling on women to have more children to create a bigger army,” he says.

Lack of rights, unemployment, marginalization and poor education, which does not allow one to learn to think critically and evaluate one’s life from the outside – all this leaves little opportunity for the expression of identity. Self-reproduction remains perhaps the last remaining freedom for Palestinians, which, of course, contributes to the achievement of Hamas’s declared goal of increasing the number of Palestinian people with an absolutely disregard for each individual human life. Everything must be subordinated to a single fanatical goal.

Naturally, Russia needs its own path and its own methods to combat the demographic crisis.