Clueless in Gaza

According to an American University webpage, the original (pre-1948) population of the arid little chunk of beachfront now known as the Gaza Strip was approximately 80,000, or 225 people per square kilometer. (To put it into perspective, that's about half the density of New Jersey, a little more than the density of Maryland, ten times the density of Mississippi, and a hundred times the density of Montana.)

Given its current (estimated) population of over one million, there are now more than 2,700 people/km2 in Gaza, putting it up there with Third World cities like Shanghai, Bangalore, Karachi, Saigon, Lima, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Baltimore (though well behind the world record holders, Mumbai at 29,000 and Manila at 41,000 per square kilometer, it's now a thousand times the density of Montana), and giving it excellent position on my places I'm glad I don't have to live list.
There are any number of cities in Europe with higher population densities (Paris is 25,000/km2, after all, though London is less than 5,000/km2), but I suspect they have a little better infrastructure (and taller buildings) to deal with it.
I'd guess that the population growth rate of 5.50%, along with not much of an economy, contributes to the stress level for young, unemployed males in Gaza. Is it any wonder that they look at suicide bombing as a life improvement scheme?

Actually, I consider the decision not to wipe Gaza (as a stateless entity) off the map in either 1948 or 1967 as one of the Israeli's major geopolitical mistakes. Even if they'd deported all the Gazans to the West Bank, or into Egypt, we'd have mostly forgotten about it by now. (Not the Palestinians, of course. But they conveniently forget that they were told to 'get out of the way' in both 1948 and 1967 in order for the Arab armies to have a clear field of fire against the Israelis. Now that really worked, didn't it...