It was in the low millions (2.5 iirc). I dont think the birthrate is existent. Women who give birth will probably die of infection due to the lack of non bombed hospitals and non assassinated doctors. Israel has recently further tightened the restrictions on aid deliveries. Once the starvation and lack of water reaches a critical point, the population could actually start collapsing very quickly.

Are you asking why birth rates increase when material conditions worsen?

Pre-war Gaza had a number of salient features that set it apart from the rest of the occupied Palestinian territories. Among them were: a high population density, with an estimated 2.3 million people squeezed into 365 square kilometers (141 square miles); a large number of UN-registered refugees, amounting to 70% of Gazans, the majority of whom lived in eight overcrowded and squalid UN-serviced refugee camps; a population that was increasing annually by 2.8% — among the highest growth rates in the world, with nearly 50% under the age of 18; and a fast-growing labor force, with new entrants to the job market joining long unemployment lines in a small and virtually broken economy.

High rates of joblessness, especially among youth (60%) and women (64%), widespread poverty (64%), and severe food insecurity (41%) produced extremely dire living conditions, rendering 80% of Gaza residents dependent on humanitarian aid for survival. Dilapidated infrastructure, environmental degradation, institutional decay, and chronic shortages in electricity and potable water added further strains. The severity of conditions in Gaza twice led the UN, in 2012 and again in 2015, to warn that if nothing was done to reverse course, the whole place would become unlivable by the year 2020.

• Understanding Gaza: A reflection on decades of failed policies and their lessons for the “day after” and beyond

The number of deaths will increase exponentially (because most of it is starvation and there's still almost no aid entering the strip), so a few years if nothing changes.

For future reference to everyone else, this is what we call a bad faith question.

The collapse of help system. I also think indirect deaths from diseases and famine are not counted by the health ministry

Yeah the 40k have been unchanged for months, which made me wonder what the real number including the witholding of aid is. So yeah… now we know.

it was 40,000 months ago…

I and a few others have been trying to tell people that Gaza is already in the dying phase. That the UN and IPC have said Northern Gaza is in famine and Southern Gaza is “imminent”. But nobody has wanted to listen. Just recently we found out that USAID made the same assessment and assessed that Israel was restricting calories on purpose. But Blinken and Biden ignored that assessment to effectively clear Israel for military aid.

And this isn’t done yet. When they dig that rubble out they’re going to find more bodies. That’s part of why Israel wants to officially occupy Gaza again. If we ever get a real number that might actually make them a parish state.

Why is this number so drastically higher than other numbers I've seen? I thought it was in the 40 thousands?

There was a Lancet study a while back that said the real number of deaths is likely five times the official number. Now that specific study doesn't have to be 100% correct, but it's a plain fact that the official number is a severe understatement, for two reasons:

First, the official number is the number of dead bodies the Gaza Health Ministry physically counted. It's the number ofphysically confirmed deaths. That's why they could release those lists of dead people, but it also means that anyone whose body wasn't taken to a hospital (say, someone starved in the middle of nowhere or died under rubble) won't be counted. This makes the GHM number the minimum possible number of deaths, not any kind of estimate trying to make up for blind spots.

Second, the Gazan healthcare system collapsed months ago. Most if not all hospitals got Al Shifa'd, and the ones working don't have gas, electricity or any supplies. This is why the number plateaued (plateau'd???) several months ago. There's nobody to count the dead, so because of the system I explained above the number is going up.

So anyway, what you're seeing in the article isn't that. It's an estimate trying to make up for the dead who aren't included in the 40000 the GHM counted. That's the reason it's so high.

Don’t forget that there are many more unaccounted for under the rubble.

The Gaza Health Ministry is crippled because Israel has bombed the vast majority of the hospitals

Are you saying that a genocide isn’t happening in Gaza right now? Are you saying that Palestinians wanted a genocide to happen to them? Wtf?