Mapping Israel’s Siege of Gaza onto the Lehigh Valley

Gaza is less than a quarter of the area of the Lehigh Valley, but packed with three times as many people, a near majority of which are children

On October 7th, Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel, killing around 1400 people and taking around 200 others into captivity. In response, Israel launched an aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip, killing, in the most recent figures, around 5,000 Palestinians. Lost in this recent spectacular uptick in violence is the broader context of Israeli abuse: what Palestinian advocates, human rights groups, and a variety of Jewish-led organizations have long referred to as a form of apartheid.

Besides absent historical context, Americans struggle to understand and respond ethically to this surge in violence, in part, because many of us are unfamiliar with the relevant geography and the region’s demographics. Here at Lehigh Valley Left View, we want to bring Israel’s assault on Gaza home, mapping the events of the last week onto familiar, much-loved places.

The Gaza strip is a mere 140 square miles–about 25 miles long and 7 miles wide–sandwiched between the state of Israel and the Mediterranean Sea. Roughly speaking, that makes the Gaza strip about the same size as the main urban corridor of the Lehigh Valley: stretching from Philipsburg west through Easton, Bethlehem, and Allentown towards Wescosville. Shifting the orientation of the Gaza Strip, we can place it a top the Lehigh valley, with Gaza City mapping roughly onto Easton and Rafah landing just west of Dorney Park.

This is the whole of Gaza: a half hour drive on 78. Laid out on this familiar geography, the demographic oddities of Gaza–its density, its youth–become more obvious, and with that, the moral bankruptcy of Israel’s genocidal assault.

The “Lehigh Valley Strip” on the map above would encircle the three largest cities of the valley and include the lion share of our region’s 700,000+ inhabitants. To have a population equal to that of the Gaza Strip, though, this patch of land would need to hold three times as many people as it does now: over two million. Indeed, the Gaza Strip is one of the most densely inhabited places in the world, with roughly 15,000 people per square mile. For comparison, the average density in the Lehigh Valley is about 900 people per square mile. Narrowing our view to just the territory covered in the “Lehigh Valley Strip” on the map would raise that figure significantly. However, Allentown, the most densely populated of the three cities, stood at just 7,100 people per square mile in the 2020 census. Gaza City, the largest urban center in Gaza, comes in at around 36,000 people per square mile, denser than any American city, including New York City. 

The crowding we see in Gaza is not the result of natural settlement patterns, but owes to what Palestinians call the Nakba: the forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians at the hands of Israelis at the dawn of their state in the middle of the 20th century. From 1947 to 1949, Zionist forces marched across “78 percent of historic Palestine, ethnically cleansed and destroyed about 530 villages and cities, and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in a series of mass atrocities, including more than 70 massacres.” Many of the roughly 700,000 Palestinians displaced from their homes in this crisis landed in Gaza. Today more than 80% of Gaza’s inhabitants were themselves displaced in the Nakba or descend from people who were. 

Not only dense, Gaza is extremely young. The median age in the Lehigh Valley strip would likely land around 40 years old, based on regional and city specific numbers. The median age in Gaza is 18. About 50% of the people that live in Gaza are under 18 years old. 

When Israel bombs Gaza, this is the landscape into which it introduces explosives: a place that is less than a quarter of the area of the Lehigh Valley, but packed with three times as many people, a near majority of which are children. Additionally, Israel has deprived that population of electricity, food, and water, since October 7th. 

Last week, Israel gave Palestinians 24 hours to evacuate from the northern half of the Gaza Strip, forcing over a million Palestinians to scrabble southward toward Rafah. In our map above, that would mean asking one million people living in the vicinity of Easton to move to Wescosville in a matter of hours. It also means that the full 2 million strong population of Gaza would need to occupy just the bit of the “Lehigh Valley Strip” that is west of Bethlehem. 

It's worth emphasizing, this Israeli order demands the total evacuation of Gaza City, the most populous portion of the Gaza Strip. This may be genuinely impossible, but if it is accomplished it would precipitate an area the size of Allentown and Bethlehem combined with near 28.5 thousand people per square mile: four times the density of Allentown. Even the UN has indicated this is an impossible and inhumane demand, more a smokescreen to justify future civilian casualties than a legitimate attempt to limit them. Indeed, Palestinian critics and jingoistic Israeli elected officials alike have referred to the coming ground war as “a second Nakba.”

With our map of the Lehigh Valley Strip, we can also gain some clarity regarding the extent of Israel’s bombing campaign. Israel has dropped some 10,000 bombs since October 7th. That is more bombs, in just over two weeks, than the US dropped in most years during our war in Afghanistan, a country that is roughly 1800 times the size of Gaza. If spread evenly across the Gaza strip, Israel's bombardment would translate to roughly 71 bombs per square mile. 

To put that back in the context of the Lehigh Valley: Easton, with its 4.8 square miles, would have weathered 348 bombings. Bethlehem’s historic downtown, about half a square mile, would have sustained 35. The whole of Allentown, at about 18 square miles, would have endured a whooping 1,278 bombs. The UN has indicated that these strikes have destroyed at least 71 schools, 145 industrial facilities, 61 media headquarters, and 18 mosques.

And then of course, there is the loss of life. Over 4,000 Palestinians have been killed so far, roughly 1500 of them children. Around 1400 people died in Northampton and Lehigh Counties combined in all of 2022. Additionally, over 12,500 have been injured in Gaza, and now depend upon a medical infrastructure enfeebled by Israel’s blockade, a lack of electricity, and intermittent bombing. 

Our local elected officials have thus far walked in lockstep with Israel’s far-right, demanding a vengeful retaliation that subjects the whole of Gaza, innocent people who did not participate in the attacks of October 7th, to brutal collective punishment (a war crime under international law). Representative Susan Wild, our voice in congress, has called on the US to send supplemental military aid to Israel, including new munitions shipments. The US already sends $3.8 billion in aid to Israel. Figures compiled by the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights tally what those tax dollars could do if they stayed within their local communities. In Allentown alone we send $1,653,519 of our taxes to Israel every year, which could put 196 families in public housing for a year, pay for free or low cost healthcare for 575 children, hire 18 new elementary school teachers, or pay the student debt of 43 college students (and the figures are similar in Bethlehem and elsewhere in the Valley). As a member of the house Foreign Affairs Committee, Susan Wild wields tremendous power to make this situation immeasurably worse for Palestinians. We must demand she act to stop the genocide.

You can reach Rep. Susan Wild at her office in Allentown (484-781-6000), Easton (610-333-1170), or Lehighton (570-807-0333). Feel free to use call scripts written by Jewish Voice for Peace or the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. 

Rep. Wild wouldn’t have to lead the way. Congresspeople of conscience–including Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others–have already introduced a resolution calling for an immediate cease fire. It's the least we would deserve if this crisis were to unfold within the confines of the Lehigh Valley, so it's the least we must demand from our elected officials. Some movements in that direction have emerged. In Easton, City Councilmember Taiba Sultana has introduced a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire. City Councilors will vote on that resolution at 6pm this Wednesday, October 25, in Easton’s City Hall (123 South 3rd street) and supporters are encouraged to attend.

Long term, we will only have peace in Palestine when we have justice. The present situation cannot hold: you cannot live in peace next to 2 million people who you have dispossessed of their ancestral homes, before barricading them behind a military blockade. The process toward a genuine peace begins with an end to Israeli apartheid and its occupation of Palestinian territories.