35,000 Gazans emigrated since October 7 – report

Israel aiding Gazans to relocate from the Gaza Strip under newly established Defense Ministry agency, charged with implementing Trump’s Gaza resettlement plan.

By David Rosenberg, World Israel News

A growing number of Gazans are emigrating permanently from the Gaza Strip and resettling abroad, according to emigration data, as Israel works to implement President Donald Trump’s plan to resettle the coastal enclave’s entire population of roughly 2,000,000.

On Saturday night, the government voted to formally establish a new authority within the Defense Ministry to help facilitate mass migration by Gazans out of the Strip to third-party countries by coordinating travel through Israeli territory to the Port of Ashdod and Ramon Airport.

While the new authority has yet to begin operations, the Defense Ministry’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) has already helped facilitate the departure of hundreds of Gazans in recent weeks.

According to a report by Channel 12 published Monday morning, 1,000 Gazans have permanently emigrated from the Strip since the beginning of March, with 600 more slated to leave this week.

Last week, 70 Gazans departed on two flights for Romania and Italy.

The 1,000 recent emigrants join some 35,000 others who are estimated to have permanently left the Gaza Strip. Channel 12 did not provide a source for this figure.

In January, the Palestinian Authority’s Central Bureau of Statistics estimated that Gaza’s population has declined by roughly 160,000 since the beginning of the war, including 100,000 Gazans who are no longer present in the Strip.

It is not clear from the PCBS data, however, how many of those Gazans who have left the Strip have resettled abroad and how many have left only temporarily.

While the total number of Gazan emigrés over the first 17 months of the war outstrips the rate of outward migration in March, the vast majority of the migration abroad occurred during the first month and a half after the October 7 invasion, with 35,000 Gazans exiting the Strip to Egypt after Cairo partially opened the Rafah crossing in November 2023.

Efforts by the Trump administration and Israel to secure host countries for Gaza residents have yet to yield fruit, and the emigration of Gazans thus far has been limited to three categories of migrants: Gazans with dual citizenship or with relatives abroad claiming citizenship in the host country, Gazans who have managed independently to secure visas to third-party countries, and Gazans who have been accepted into third-party countries for medical treatment.

Migrants enter Israeli territory via the Kerem Shalom border crossing, where they undergo security checks by Israel’s Shin Bet internal security agency. Afterwards, they are transferred out of the Strip, either to Egypt via the Rafah border crossing or across Israeli territory to the Ramon Airport north of Eilat, or to the Allenby border crossing on the Jordanian frontier.