A reader has pointed out that the population of wartime Leningrad was about 2 1/2 million -- about the same as Gaza.
Quote from “ Leningrad, State of Siege.” By Michael Jones, Basic Books, 2008.
"With Moscow in dire peril, the Soviet would be unable to help Leningrad. Hitler felt the city’s utter vulnerability and set out his plans for destroying it and starving its people to death.
“The Führer has decided to erase the city of Petersburg from the face of the earth,” he wrote in a memo. “It is intended to encircle the city and level it to the ground by means of artillery bombardment using every caliber of shell, and continual bombing from the air.”
Hitler Chooses Starvation as a Weapon
The memo stressed that requests for surrender negotiations were to be ignored since the Nazis didn’t have the desire to feed the city’s large population. Hitler had chosen a chilling alternative to advancing on Leningrad directly: he would simply wait for it to starve to death.
By the time of Hitler’s directive, the Germans had already set up artillery and launched a campaign to shell Leningrad into submission. The Luftwaffe, Germany’s air force, also conducted regular bombing runs over the city. An incendiary attack on September 8 caused raging fires that destroyed vital supplies of oil and food.
An even bigger raid followed on September 19, when the Luftwaffe unleashed 2,500 high-explosive and incendiary bombs. All told, an estimated 75,000 bombs were dropped on the city over the course of the blockade.
While enemy fire would eventually kill or wound some 50,000 civilians during the siege, Leningrad’s most serious problem was lack of food. Some 600,000 people had been evacuated before the Germans tightened their grip on the city, but some 2.5 million civilians still remained. “