'1.7 million' Palestinians in Gaza? Trump's statement raises questions about death toll
U.S. president's plan to relocate '1.7 or 1.8 million people' conflicts with official tallies
President Donald Trump's assertion that the U.S. can relocate "1.7 or 1.8 million" Palestinians has raised questions about the death toll in Gaza.
Trump made the comments last week while announcing a surprise plan to take over the region, which has been devastated by the Israel-Hamas war that began in October 2023.
Gaza's population was estimated at over 2.2 million before the war, and the Gaza Health Ministry's official death count sits at 61,709.
Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, says she found Trump's numbers "puzzling" — and a potential confirmation that the death toll is actually much higher, something researchers, doctors and public health experts have long said was the case.
"I was just surprised that I saw that, and no one even flinched. They were just like, 'Oh, OK, 1.7 left.' And I'm like, 'So where did the half a million or 400,000 people go?" she said.
Sridhar says she would expect Trump has received the best intelligence on the matter, and the fact he has cited the number several times suggests it came from American or Israeli officials. Trump touted his displacement plan to reporters in a recent meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The White House did not respond to CBC's requests for comment.
Lancet study estimated 186,000 deaths last July
An academic study from science journal The Lancet last July estimated that "186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza," including deaths from starvation and other repercussions of the war. The study used a "conservative" estimate of four "indirect" deaths per one direct death and based it on the death toll of 37,396 that had been reported by the Gaza Health Ministry at the time.
It noted that in comparable recent conflicts, "such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths."
A separate peer-reviewed Lancet study from last month estimated the number of direct deaths due to traumatic injury had also been underreported by about 41 per cent, with bodies remaining missing and buried under rubble.
Sridhar has also warned of the possibility of a death toll in the hundreds of thousands, given the scale of destruction, lack of health facilities, plumbing and sanitation, as well as the lack of food and clean water.
"In the scientific community, I think those estimates have kind of been accepted as back-of-the-envelope, based on other conflicts," she said.
Sridhar says the Gaza Health Ministry's numbers have long been unreliable, in part because the civil registration system has shut down due to the war. Several experts CBC News spoke with agreed the official numbers were not likely accurate.
Yara Asi, author of How War Kills: The Overlooked Threats to Our Health and assistant professor in the School of Global Health Management and Informatics at the University of Central Florida, says it's not surprising Trump is citing a population of 1.7 or 1.8 million, given epidemiologists were saying for months the death toll could be in the hundreds of thousands.
More than 100,000 Palestinians are believed to have fled to Egypt during the war as well, which may have been factored into Trump's tally, though many do not have secure resident status in Egypt and planned to return to Gaza.
"This is a tell that there is some indication that the U.S. government has known, including under the Biden administration, that things were much worse than they were letting on," Asi said.
She said Israel has extensive surveillance throughout Gaza, through drones and soldiers on the ground, and likely has more accurate numbers than the Gaza Health Ministry, which could have been relayed to Trump.
"On the other hand, it's impossible to take too seriously much of what he says, because he says a lot of things that are not true," she noted. "So we have to balance both of those realities."
Trump plan not 'in any way feasible': expert
Annelle Sheline, a research fellow for the Middle East at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and a former foreign affairs officer with the U.S. State Department, said it's possible Trump has been briefed on updated numbers — but it's also possible he is trying to "undersell" how many people would have to be relocated under his plan.
Several of the experts CBC News spoke with agreed that, whatever the exact number of Palestinians in Gaza, Trump's proposed relocation plan — which a UN commission has said amounts to ethnic cleansing — is not logistically possible.
"I don't think it's in any way feasible," Sheline said. "He's saying, 'No, they will want to leave,' refusing to engage with such a fundamental aspect of why there is an Israel-Palestine conflict, which is [that] Israelis have been trying to displace Palestinians for decades, and they are resisting that."
Sheline says the plan would require significant U.S. military expenditure to occupy the territory and forcibly round up Palestinians. Even then, it would be "extremely difficult," because insurgencies would continue cropping up.
"It is a task that America has already failed to accomplish in Iraq and Afghanistan. And so it's somewhat astonishing that Trump would propose essentially doing something similar in Gaza," she said.
Sheline says the prospect of taking in displaced people from Gaza is "an existential threat" for Jordan that would be politically destabilizing. With a population of 11 million, taking in one million refugees would be the equivalent of Canada taking in 3.5 million, but in a much smaller area.
Jordan's King Abdullah II met with Trump Tuesday but did not commit to any specifics of the plan.
While Egypt has more capacity than Jordan to absorb refugees, Sheline said President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi would be seen as capitulating to Israel and abandoning Egypt's longstanding support for a Palestinian state, which would be politically damaging.
She says Arab leaders in the Middle East have been willing to partner with the U.S. because it has helped them solidify their power, but that partnership is predicated on the U.S. keeping them in power.
"As soon as the U.S. asked a ruler to do something that would so fundamentally threaten their hold on power, as would be the case in Jordan, it is fundamentally altering the basis for why Arab countries are willing to partner with the U.S. in the first place," she said.
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Gaza writer and analyst and resident senior fellow on the Atlantic Council, agrees, saying U.S. foreign aid to Jordan and Egypt has "basically been a bribe to keep them in whatever form of peace that exists with Israel."
While this has been beneficial to both sides, he says Trump would be wrong to assume U.S. aid is more important to those countries' leaders than the stability of their regimes.
"The consequences of taking in more Palestinians from Gaza is far more consequential than the threat to regime stability if they were to lose access to U.S. foreign aid," he said.
Palestinians 'being treated like objects': public health expert
Several experts told CBC they are worried the ceasefire will break down by Saturday, causing a return to the violence that dragged out for more than a year.
Whether or not talks break down this week, Sridhar worries for the health of Palestinians under Trump's proposal, saying the impact of nearly two million people ending up in refugee camps in Jordan or Egypt, if those countries accept them at all, could be dire.
"From a public health perspective, it's absolutely horrific to have forced relocation … Disease becomes rife, and mortality rates skyrocket," she said.
"I feel like we've kind of forgotten that there are humans in this, who have basic human needs to survive. They're almost being treated like objects, and people aren't objects."
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