Any backup for your 12 million claim?
Sure.
en.wikipedia.org
That is because you have to count the Arab in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, refugee camps in Lebanon, refugee camps in Jordan, refugee camps in Syria, etc.
The fact Israel won't allow Palestinians who left to avoid the 1948 violence come back, is a war crime.
{...
Despite various wars and
exoduses (such as
that of 1948), roughly one half of the world's Palestinian population continues to reside in
historic Palestine, the area encompassing the
West Bank, the
Gaza Strip, and
Israel.
[46] In this combined area, as of 2005, Palestinians constituted 49% of all inhabitants,
[47] encompassing the entire population of the Gaza Strip (1.865 million),
[48] the majority of the population of the West Bank (approximately 2,785,000 versus about 600,000 Jewish
Israeli citizens, which includes about 200,000 in
East Jerusalem) and almost 21% of the population of
Israel proper as
Arab citizens of Israel.
[49][50] Many are
Palestinian refugees or
internally displaced Palestinians, including more than a million in the Gaza Strip,
[51] about 750,000 in the West Bank
[52] and about 250,000 in Israel proper. Of the Palestinian population who live abroad, known as the
Palestinian diaspora, more than half are
stateless, lacking
citizenship in any country.
[53] Between 2.1 and 3.24 million of the diaspora population live as refugees in neighboring
Jordan,
[54][55] over 1 million live between
Syria and
Lebanon and about 750,000 live in
Saudi Arabia, with
Chile's half a million representing the largest concentration outside the
Middle East.
Palestinian
Christians and
Muslims constituted 90% of the population of Palestine in 1919, just before the
third wave of
Jewish immigration under the post-
WW1 British Mandatory Authority,
[56][57] opposition to which spurred the consolidation of a unified national identity, fragmented as it was by regional, class, religious and family differences.
[58][59] The history of the
Palestinian national identity is a disputed issue amongst scholars.
[60][61] "
Palestinian" was used to refer to the
nationalist concept of a Palestinian people by Palestinian Arabs from the late 19th century, albeit in a limited way until World War I.
[42][43] The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and creation of
Mandatory Palestine replaced Ottoman citizenship with Palestinian citizenship, solidifying a national identity. After the
creation of the State of Israel, the
exodus of 1948 and more so after the
exodus of 1967, the term evolved into a sense of a shared future in the form of aspirations for a significantly-reduced
Palestinian state.
[42] Palestinian identity encompasses the heritage of all ages from
biblical times up to the
Ottoman period.
[62]
...}
