Israelis are convinced Palestinians want to leave Gaza. What do Gazans themselves say?
Palestinians fleeing their homes in Jabalya refugee camp after the Israeli army issued evacuation orders on 9 June 2025
Dahlia Scheindlin writes in Haaretz on 11 June 2025:
A recent survey showing that a sweeping majority of Jewish Israelis support the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza continues to rankle those – particularly on the left – who don’t want to believe that so many Israelis could think such bad things.
But among the technical and professional debates over the poll, audiences may be missing the broader context of conversations and commentary in Israel that supports such attitudes.
One key example is the fact that Hebrew-language discourse on the fate of Gazans is practically mass self-induced conviction about how much Palestinians want to leave. For months, Israeli media, commentators and their proxies abroad in right-wing and mainstream forums alike have clung to satisfying headlines such as: “Desperation in the Strip, and the longing to leave: ‘Emigration or suicide are the only options,'” as per a headline in Ynet, the national barometer news portal, from July 2024.
Last month, Israel’s Channel 12 bragged of an exclusive story about a “comprehensive survey” which was “conducted by foreign actors” in Gaza – the article gave no other information – testing how many Gazans wished to leave. Of course, a survey that is not accessible to readers, with no methodological detail provided, is a fraud. Anyone can make up any number at all. But even with such wide room for maneuver, Channel 12 reported that just half of Gazans wanted to leave. That sounds suspiciously like Maariv’s stellar journalism – in a March report on a survey with no name, no methodological information, nor link to a source – conducted “in recent months” which found that half of Gazans wish to leave.
But data points will still capture people’s attention, especially when it’s something they either desperately want, or don’t want, to believe. Luckily there’s real research out there to provide credible trends.
The most systematic baseline study, a starting point to measure Palestinian thoughts about emigration from Gaza from before the war, comes from the Arab Barometer. This is an ongoing survey project launched in 2006, which has conducted eight different waves in Palestine, and in 15 other countries.
In September and October 2023, the Arab Barometer asked whether Palestinians were considered emigrating – data collection in Gaza (a sample of nearly 400 respondents) ended on October 6. At the time, 31 percent of Gazans said they had considered emigration.
How should that number be interpreted? One point of comparison is from Israel itself, where a pre-war Israeli Democracy Index survey, with data collected in June 2023, found that 22 percent in total said they would take citizenship and live elsewhere if they could. Given the hardships of life in Gaza, with 45 percent unemployment and a GDP per capita of a few hundred U.S. dollars, a gap of just nine points with the rate of Gazans who thought about leaving seems moderate.
Destroyed buildings in Gaza are seen behind the border fence separating the Strip and Israel, June 2025
What’s happened since?
Israelis and right-wingers frequently and confidently declare that the portion of Palestinians who want to leave Gaza has risen tremendously since before the war. The truth is a far more mixed picture.
Consider the fundamental starting point of most human beings: In September 2024, 92 percent of Gazans said they wanted to go back to their pre-war homes in Gaza, in a survey by Zogby Research, an American polling agency with longtime experience polling Palestinians. That seems natural. The most recent survey is from early May. The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (with whom I collaborate on the joint Israeli-Palestinian surveys) asked the question: “U.S. President Trump has said that it may be better to displace the residents of the Gaza Strip in order to rebuild that area. Are you willing to emigrate from the Strip after the war ends?”
The response choices were “yes” or “no,” and 43 percent of the Gazan respondents said yes. Nearly half, 49 percent, said that they would apply to Israel’s “emigration authority,” the newly established project of Defense Minister Israel Katz, for help exiting through Israeli ports and crossings.
For the Israeli right-wing, a starting point of half the population who wants to leave is surely a sign of the messiah, especially for the fanatics and fundamentalists in government. But other indicators of Palestinian attitudes in Gaza show a different picture. Asking a similar question with different response options shows that substantially fewer people actually want to leave in any permanent way. Also this May, a poll for the Tony Blair Institute, conducted by Zogby Research, found that 38 percent said they would not leave under any circumstances; another 32 percent would only leave temporarily, if their return is guaranteed – that’s 70 percent in total who want to return.
Just 30 percent said they would “prefer to leave Gaza for another country.” In a separate question, out of those who would consider leaving temporarily, only 44 percent of Zogby’s respondents said they wanted to stay in the Middle East – either close to the border in Sinai or other Arab states. That supports the intention to be close to home, for future return.
But the striking number is the 30 percent considering leaving Gaza. It’s only nine points higher than Israelis, 21 percent of whom, when asked again by the Israel Democracy Institute for the 2024 Democracy Index, said they would consider leaving – with life in Israel incomparably better than in Gaza.
The war is of course taking a great toll on Israelis, but let’s put it into perspective. In a March survey of Gazans by the Palestinian Institute for Social and Economic Progress, 85 percent said their homes had been partly or completely destroyed, while 70 percent are living in tents or in a destroyed home. Over half do not have access to drinking water or a bed, and nearly half don’t have enough water to keep clean.
Eman Hillis, a Gaza-based fact-checker with Misbar website, told me that “there are people who say they want to leave and don’t really care if they were deprived of the opportunity to come back. These people have suffered a lot during the war – they’ve lost homes and loved ones, or were displaced multiple times – and many oppose Hamas’s decisions.”
The last point raises questions about why it’s even in Israel’s interest to empty Gaza of those who oppose Hamas. Hillis also notes that many older people especially won’t contemplate leaving. Either way, Israeli and Palestinian realities are incomparable, yet fewer than one-third of Palestinians want to leave for good.
Travelers gathering around a departures board at Ben-Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv
The Israeli right-wing, specifically that portion who believes in miracles, surely counts the 32 percent of Gazans who would leave temporarily as part of their miracle. In 1948, Palestinians thought they were leaving temporarily too, and Israeli Jewish settlers know better than any how temporary becomes permanent in the Middle East.
So do Palestinians, who aren’t rushing to make the same mistake twice. Hillis wrote to me that some people in Gaza “don’t want to leave permanently but would like to have an opportunity and travel. I have a friend who… wants to go for a brief moment to Egypt just to eat proper food (not the canned food we have been surviving on since the beginning of the war) and then come back to Gaza, even in wartime.”
Hillis herself has aims any reader should recognize: She wants to travel abroad to complete her studies, “but if there were a risk I couldn’t return, I would never take that chance.”
War is a boomerang
If Israelis hope the ongoing military assault will generate more Palestinian desire to leave, they might miss the obvious problem that war is a double-edged bitch. Israelis aren’t suffering like Gazans, but more and more don’t like living here either. Maariv again failed to provide adequate survey information, but recently reported that three times as many young people want to leave Israel as those who said so in the early phase of the war.
A slightly more accessible survey by the societal/political trend researcher Madad from March 2023, during the first intense months of Israeli protests against the government’s assault on the judiciary, found that 29 percent of the Jewish population either considered leaving or actually began working towards this aim.
It’s true that the Israeli Democracy Index from 2024 found that only about 21 percent of all Israelis wanted to emigrate if they could get citizenship in a Western country, but beyond surveys, there’s the sobering reality that in 2022, the number of emigrants from Israel rose 46 percent compared to the average emigration rate of the previous 12 years.
By 2024, 82,700 Israelis left the country during one year – about 50 percent higher than 2023 – and a well over 100 percent increase from the 36,000 average through 2021; the figures were provided by the Israeli Knesset’s Research and Information Center.
It’s not impossible that Israel will find ways to keep torturing Gaza in order boot Palestinians out and call it voluntary. But there may not be much left of Israel by then either.
This article is reproduced in its entirety