Life in Gaza in 9 Graphics: The 2014 War and What Came After

AP

The Gaza Strip is a narrow piece of coast about 41 kilometres long, with an area of 365 square kilometres (141 square miles). In July 2014, when the graphics below were collected, roughly 1.7 to 1.8 million Palestinians lived there under an Israeli and Egyptian blockade that had been in place since Hamas took control in 2007. Israel and armed groups in Gaza were fighting their third war in six years.

The nine charts and maps in this article were gathered during that 2014 war to explain everyday conditions behind the headlines: who lives in Gaza, how crowded it is, how the blockade shapes jobs, food and water, and how unequal the casualty figures have been. Several were made by Visualizing Palestine, an advocacy design group, and one by the Palestinian-American Jerusalem Fund, so they argue a point of view; others come from the UN's humanitarian office (OCHA), the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem and Reuters. Each caption below explains what the graphic shows, where the numbers come from and how they compare with later data.

At the end you will find a summary of the far deadlier war that began in October 2023, because the Gaza described in these graphics no longer exists in the same form.

The 2014 war in brief

AP

Rocket trails and interceptor contrails over the coast during the fighting. Israel called its campaign Operation Protective Edge (in Hebrew, roughly "Strong Cliff"). It ran from 8 July to 26 August 2014, after the abduction and killing of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank in June and a wave of arrests and rocket fire that followed. By the end, according to the Israeli military, Palestinian groups had fired about 4,564 rockets and mortars toward Israel.

AP

Neighbours gather around the wreckage of a car after a night air strike. In the first weeks of July, rockets from Gaza reached further than in earlier rounds, setting off sirens over Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, while Israel's defence minister, Moshe Ya'alon, warned that the operation would widen and would not necessarily be short. The cost on the ground in Gaza rose quickly.

AP

Mourners carry a child's body through a crowd. One case that drew wide attention at the time was the Kaware family home in Khan Younis, which was hit in the first days of the war even though neighbours had gathered on the roof to try to prevent the strike. Eight people were reported killed, six of them children, and the Israeli military later described the strike as a mistake. When the war ended, UN figures counted 2,220 Palestinians killed, including 1,492 civilians and 551 children; on the Israeli side, 67 soldiers and 6 civilians died.

(The video originally embedded here is no longer available on YouTube.)

The clip that once appeared here showed a strike on the home of a man said to be a senior Hamas figure in northern Gaza, filmed by people nearby. It has since been removed from YouTube.

Land, people and identity

Visualizing Palestine

This Visualizing Palestine poster, "Identity Crisis", shows how Israel's population registry sorts people into categories, from Jewish Israelis to West Bank and Gaza residents, each with different rights to move, live and vote. Gaza ID holders sit near the bottom: since 2007 they have been largely barred from leaving the Strip. The original 2014 headline for this item stressed that Gaza's people are confined to 141 square miles, and that figure is accurate: the whole Strip is about the size of Detroit.

OCHA

An OCHA fact sheet from December 2012 with a satellite view of Gaza City. It gives a population of 1,644,293 spread across five governorates, average water use of 80 to 90 litres per person per day (below the WHO benchmark of 100 litres), unemployment of 31.5 percent and food insecurity affecting 44 percent of people. Unemployment later climbed much higher, to around 46 percent overall and 70 percent among young people.

OCHA

A population pyramid by age and sex, based on Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics data. The base is very wide: the largest groups are young children, and about half the population is under 18. That matters when reading casualty figures, because in a place this young, any widespread violence will hit children hard.

Blockade, food and water

Visualizing Palestine

"Gaza Water: Confined and Contaminated" (Visualizing Palestine, 2012) explains why water is one of Gaza's most serious problems. The Strip relies almost entirely on a single coastal aquifer that is pumped far faster than rain refills it, so seawater and sewage seep in. The poster states that 95 percent of that water was unfit to drink, and links the crisis to the blockade's limits on fuel, power and repair materials.

The blockade itself is a point of sharp disagreement. Israel says it is needed to stop weapons smuggling and rocket attacks. UN bodies and human rights groups have described it as collective punishment. Its economic effect is clearer: the World Bank estimated in 2015 that Gaza's GDP was more than 50 percent lower than it would otherwise have been, with exports almost wiped out.

Weapons, ceasefires and casualties

Thomson Reuters

A Reuters graphic from November 2012 explaining Iron Dome, Israel's short-range missile defence. Radar tracks an incoming rocket, a control unit predicts where it will land, and an interceptor is fired only if it is heading for a populated area. In 2014 the system intercepted more than 735 projectiles, which goes a long way to explain why Israeli civilian casualties stayed comparatively low.

Ben White

This chart, published by the journalist Ben White, covers the three months after the November 2012 ceasefire that ended Israel's Operation Pillar of Defense. It counts 4 Palestinians killed and 91 wounded by Israeli forces in Gaza, 63 shooting incidents, 13 ground incursions and 30 naval attacks on fishermen, against 2 mortar shells and no rockets fired from Gaza in the same period. Its point is that "calm" in Gaza did not mean the absence of violence.

Jerusalem Fund

A Jerusalem Fund illustration comparing the weapons of Palestinian groups in Gaza (mortars and Qassam, Grad and Fajr-5 rockets) with Israel's arsenal of F-16 jets, Apache helicopters, drones and missiles. It also compares deaths from the end of 2008 to September 2012: 18 Israelis killed by Gaza-based groups and 1,661 Palestinians in Gaza killed by Israeli forces.

B'Tselem

B'Tselem's table for Operation Cast Lead, 27 December 2008 to 18 January 2009, records 1,391 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza. The 2014 caption said four Israelis died in that war; the correct total is 13: three civilians and ten soldiers, four of whom were killed by friendly fire. Six years on, during Pillar of Defense in November 2012, B'Tselem counted 167 Palestinians killed, while six Israelis (four civilians and two soldiers) died.

Visualizing Palestine

Visualizing Palestine's timeline of deaths since the Second Intifada began in September 2000 shows monthly fatalities, with tall spikes for each major operation, including Cast Lead, the tallest. Palestinian deaths outnumber Israeli deaths many times over across the whole period. The poster also argues that most breakdowns of calm began with Palestinians being killed, a claim based on its own coding of events that other analysts would dispute.

What has changed since October 2023

Everything above describes a Gaza of about 1.7 million people. By 2023 its population had passed two million. On 7 October 2023, Hamas-led fighters attacked southern Israel, killing about 1,195 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 hostages. Israel's military response turned into the longest and deadliest war in Gaza's history.

By 27 September 2026, Gaza's Health Ministry, which is part of the Hamas-run administration, had recorded 74,016 Palestinian deaths and more than 175,000 wounded. The ministry does not separate fighters from civilians, but it says women and children make up about half of the dead, and UN agencies have generally found its records reliable. Independent studies suggest the true toll is higher. A UN-backed food security analysis confirmed famine in parts of Gaza in August 2025; by December that year, after more aid entered, it said famine conditions no longer applied, though the situation remained fragile.

A ceasefire brokered by the United States took effect on 10 October 2025, and the last living hostages were released that month. The heaviest fighting stopped, but Israeli strikes continued and more than 1,100 Palestinians were reported killed in the year after the truce. Most of the plan's later stages, including Hamas disarmament, a new Palestinian administration and reconstruction, had not begun by autumn 2026, and Israel still controlled more than half of the territory.

How to read graphics like these

Infographics are powerful because they compress a lot of data into one picture. They also leave things out. A few habits help:

• Check who made it. Advocacy groups on every side of this conflict produce graphics. That does not make their numbers wrong, but it shapes what they choose to show.
• Look for the date. Most of the charts here date from 2012, and Gaza's numbers have changed sharply since.
• Look for the original data. B'Tselem, the UN's OCHA office and the Israeli military all publish casualty figures; where they agree, you can be more confident.
• Remember both sides of the fence. Rocket fire terrified Israeli families too, even when Iron Dome kept the death toll low.

What the 2014 graphics still capture well is the shape of daily life in Gaza: a very young, crowded population, closed borders, scarce clean water and an economy kept small. Those conditions were the backdrop to every round of fighting, and they are the starting point for any serious discussion of what comes next.

Sources: Original 2014 compilation by Mic; Wikipedia: 2014 Gaza War; Wikipedia: Gaza War (2008–2009); Wikipedia: Operation Pillar of Defense; Wikipedia: Gaza Strip; Wikipedia: Blockade of the Gaza Strip; Wikipedia: Gaza war; Boston Globe/AP, 27 September 2026. Photographs: AP. Graphics: Visualizing Palestine, OCHA, Thomson Reuters, Ben White, the Jerusalem Fund and B'Tselem.

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