Here’s a story with potentially huge implications, as the Palestinian Authority is caught red-handed perpetrating another Big Lie: Palestinian overcount.

When new Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas starts a new round of talks with Israel soon, it is a sure bet that one of his strongest motivating tools to spur the creation of a new Arab state is that surging Palestinian population figures mean that Jews will soon be outnumbered.

But a demographic study released this week could change all that. An eight-person team found that the actual number of residents in Gaza and the West Bank is nearly 1.4 million fewer than the published population of 3.8 million — and they derived much of that number from Palestinian figures.

By any standard, the official tally of 3.8 million Palestinians is a breathtaking number. Both Israel and the then-new Palestinian Authority (PA) agreed in 1996 that the population was roughly 2 million — which would mean that the number of people living in Gaza and the West Bank has nearly doubled in eight short years.

During the same time frame, however, birth rates have declined all across the Arab world — except for Palestinians the standard of living for ordinary Palestinians is easily among the highest in Arab world, which should mean that their birth rates would be among the lowest in the region, not the highest.

As improbable as the official PA population figures are, they have not been challenged until now. The United States, the European Union, the United Nations, and even Israel have all accepted the claim that 3.8 million Palestinians live in the territories. And all have used that “fact,” to varying degrees, to argue that Israel needs to have a separate Palestinian state and pronto.

It seems the only ones who knew that the population figures were bogus were the Palestinian leaders themselves. It was from analyzing numbers released by various Palestinian agencies, in fact, that the researchers discovered that the published count of 3.8 million was severely inflated.