Country · Asia
Palestine
State of Palestine
Palestine is a country in Western Asia. Its capital city is Ramallah. About 4.6 million people live there, in an area of 6 220 square kilometres.
The countries of the world do not agree about Palestine. Most members of the United Nations recognise it as a state of its own; at the United Nations itself Palestine holds an observer seat rather than full membership.
Picture credit: Addshore (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Addshore (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Nirvana dwaik1 (CC BY-SA 4.0) · أمين (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Mujaddara (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is Palestine?
Palestine lies in Western Asia, on the continent of Asia.
It sits in the northern half of the world, roughly 3 551 km from the equator.
It shares a border with 3 countries: Israel, Egypt and Jordan.
How big is Palestine?
Palestine covers 6 220 square kilometres.
That is about 2.4 times the size of Luxembourg.
If everybody spread out evenly, there would be about 734.6 people on every square kilometre.
Who lives in Palestine?
About 4.6 million people live in Palestine.
People here speak Arabic.
They pay with the Egyptian pound (E£).
On average, people born here can expect to live about 71 years.
The land of Palestine
It lies between the tropics and the poles, which is the single biggest reason its weather is the way it is.
What makes Palestine different?
A dish the country is known for: Arab salad, Falafel and Mujaddara.
Websites from here often end in .ps.
Palestine and the rest of the world
Out of every thousand people alive on Earth, about 0.6 live in Palestine.
It takes up about 0 % of all the land that countries stand on.
That is busier than the world average of roughly 60 people per square kilometre.
Palestine and its neighbours
Egypt, its largest neighbour, is about 161.2 times bigger.
Egypt has more people: 98.4 million against 4.6 million.
A country, or a territory?
Palestine is not an independent country but a territory. It has its own name, its own borders and often its own laws, but another country speaks for it abroad — it holds no seat of its own at the United Nations, for instance.
That is more common than it sounds. There are dozens of such places around the world: some sit far from the country they belong to, some right beside it. A few govern themselves almost completely and hand over only defence and foreign policy; others are held more closely. How much a territory decides for itself is settled case by case, never by one rule.
On this site territories get a page of their own, because children look them up and because other pages link to them. They are left out of the record lists, though: those rank only members of the United Nations, so that a ranking never mixes countries with places belonging to somebody else.
Its nearest neighbour by land is Israel.
Questions children ask
What is the capital of Palestine?
The capital of Palestine is Ramallah. It is the city where the country's government works from.
How many people live in Palestine?
About 4.6 million people live in Palestine. (Source: World Bank, 2018.)
Which countries border Palestine?
Palestine borders Israel, Egypt and Jordan — 3 neighbours in total.
How big is Palestine?
Palestine covers 6 220 square kilometres. That is about 2.4 times the size of Luxembourg.
Which continent is Palestine in?
Palestine is in Asia, in the part called Western Asia.
Where these numbers come from
Borders and outlines: Natural Earth. Names, capitals, areas, languages and currencies: ISO 3166 data (world-countries). Population: World Bank, 2018. Every derived figure on this page (ranks, density, distance from the equator) is calculated from those values.
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