I've been sitting with some numbers this afternoon, and I think I've discovered something.
In the year 2000, 1.1 million people lived in Gaza.
In 2023, 2.2 million lived there.
That's a doubling in twenty-three years - it's a faster population growth than almost anywhere else on the planet, and it happened under blockade, under four wars, under a regime that used their cement on tunnels instead of critical infrastructure for the daily lives of the people they were put in charge of leading.
At the end of 2025, after two years of war, the Palestinian Authority's own statistics bureau, the bureau that the UN, the World Bank and the press get their Gaza numbers from, counted the population at 2.13 million. That is, roughly the same number as in 2022. The death tolls the bureau works with come from the Ministry of Health in Gaza, which is Hamas' own.
Neither of the two institutions has any interest whatsoever in counting too low.
This is where I sat. And stared a bit into the air.
Because the same bureau calls it a "demographic haemorrhage" in the same press release, and parts of the world call it "genocide" - so I've been sitting here trying to understand how those two things connect, and I think I've figured it out.
It's not the numbers that have changed.
It's the word.
Because I remember what the word was invented for. It was created after 1945, and the yardstick was a people of seventeen million who in six years became eleven million, and who only around 2020 reached back to the number they had when it began.
That's what the word meant. It meant that afterwards there were fewer. Much fewer. And that they didn't come back.
So what I've discovered is that the word has since been expanded.
Let me explain.
It now covers both a people who lost a third of themselves, and a people who doubled under their executioner and today are exactly as many as they were three years ago.
It covers both the gas chambers and a war the accused did not start, and which stops the day the other party lays down their weapons. It's an impressive stretch for one word.
I actually don't know a single other word that can do that.
And then I noticed one more thing I hadn't expected. The statistics bureau counts lower birth rates in the haemorrhage. Children who haven't been conceived because their parents waited to reproduce - as parents have always waited in war, in London in 1941 and in Kyiv in 2022 - are ALSO recorded as losses.
That means the genocide parts of the world are talking about also includes the people who don't exist. Never came to be.
I don't think the word has ever covered that before either.
And right down here we get to the most peculiar part.
Because at the same time I was sitting looking at all these numbers and trying to make the whole thing add up, a story came in about Simona Mohamsson, who leads the Swedish Liberal Party. She's the daughter of a Lebanese mother and a Palestinian father from Haifa, and she wore a Star of David in the party leader debate in Sweden.
She said she wore it for the children who no longer dare wear it in Sweden. A beautiful and strong thought.
Since then she's been allowed to learn what the word genocide in practice protects against, because the stream of hate that hit her didn't come from those accused of it, but from those who in these years are accusing.
So today, in a Nordic country, you can be declared a defender of genocide by wearing the surviving people's symbol around your neck?
And this happens in the same week as the people the crime was supposed to have been committed against are counted up to the same number they were before it began?
Well, well. There you go.
So no, I haven't figured out how Israel does it. But I HAVE figured out that you no longer need to do anything specific to use the word.
When the word was created, it described what had happened to a people.
Now it describes what one thinks about a state.
❤️🔥🪽
Good evening, friends.
Don't let them steal your words.
They're all we have to describe reality.
