PA Admits Inflating Palestinian Population in Judea and Samaria

The Palestinian Authority (PA) consistently inflates the Palestinian population in Judea and Samaria. In a recent “brief on the status of the Palestinian people at the end of 2025,”¹ the PA Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) claimed a population of 5.56 million in the State of Palestine, with 3.43 million in the West Bank (emphasis added), figures that are central to the PA’s narrative.

Yet, recent PA admissions for upcoming municipal elections reveal that the actual population in Judea and Samaria is at most 2.9 million—over 530,000 fewer people than previously claimed.

The admission was made as part of the PA preparations to hold municipal elections at the end of April 2026.²

According to the law enacted by the PA for the elections,³ “Decree-Law No. (23) of 2025 Concerning the Election of Local Authority Councils,” all Palestinians who, on election day, are aged 18 and upwards have the right to vote.⁴

In preparation for the elections, the PA Central Elections Committee (CEC) published both general statistics⁵ and detailed voter lists,⁶ divided into 11 districts⁷ and scores of sub-districts. The voter lists included the names of all the voters and other personal details.⁸ According to the general statistics, 1,491,324 Palestinians are eligible to vote in the elections.

In other words, assuming the CEC did a thorough and professional job preparing the statistics and lists, according to the PA, the number of eligible voters, 1,491,324, accounts for all the Palestinians aged 18 and above living in Judea and Samaria.

A separate publication by the PCBS provides annual statistics on the number of Palestinian births in Judea and Samaria for the years 2008 through 2023.⁹ According to these statistics, between 2008 and 2023, there were 1,250,783 live births. Since there are no statistics for the years 2024 and 2025, for the purpose of this study, we assume that the number of births for those years was an average of the births for the preceding 16 years. The average birth rate in those years was 78,174 people, accounting for 156,348 people in both missing years.

Thus, the number of Palestinians under the age of 18 is most likely no more than 1,407,131 people.

When added to the number of eligible voters, that gives an entire Palestinian population in Judea and Samaria as 2,898,455, or 530,000 fewer people than claimed by the PA.¹⁰

In reality, this figure itself is most likely substantially inflated.

As Amb. Yoram Ettinger has shown, for political and financial reasons, that the PA consistently inflates birth rates and underreports deaths. Thus, according to Ettinger, the entire Palestinian population in Judea and Samaria is most probably no more than 1.5 million people.¹¹

Anomalies in the birth rates reported by the PA are also evident from their own statistics. Thus, for example, reported births inexplicably jumped 10.8% from 77,951 in 2016 to 86,446 in 2022. Similarly, while the crude death rate for Palestinians in Judea and Samaria stands at approximately 3.7¹² deaths per 1,000 people, the officially reported deaths are much lower. Thus, while in 2022 the PA claimed that there were 3.2 million Palestinians living in Judea and Samaria,¹³ which should have represented approximately 11,840 deaths (3.7 per 1,000), the number of officially reported deaths was 8,722,¹⁴ a shortfall of over 3,000 deaths, or 34.4%.

Similar to the death tolls in the war in Gaza, the PA and other Palestinian actors often distort population statistics – births and deaths alike – to promote their political agenda. This being the case, little to no real weight should be given to any of the Palestinian reports on this subject, irrespective of whether the statistics originate from Hamas or the PA.

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