How Big Is Palestine? West Bank, Gaza and Areas A, B and C Explained

How big is Palestine? The two Palestinian territories, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, together cover about 6,025 square kilometers, or roughly 2,326 square miles, using Encyclopaedia Britannica's figures. That is a little smaller than the US state of Delaware.

About 5.56 million Palestinians lived in the two territories at the end of 2025, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS). This guide gives the area of each territory, compares it to US states, and explains what Areas A, B and C of the West Bank are.

The area of Palestine in numbers

"Palestine" here means the two Palestinian territories: the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Historically the name also referred to the larger British Mandate territory, which, as Britannica notes, covered present-day Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.

The CIA World Factbook's last edition (2025, now archived) used slightly different boundaries. It gave 5,860 square km for the West Bank, of which 5,640 is land and 220 is water, counting the northwest quarter of the Dead Sea, and 360 square km for Gaza. That makes about 6,220 square km in total. The gap between sources is a matter of what is counted, not a dispute about the map.

• West Bank: about 5,660 square km (2,185 square miles), according to Britannica.
• Gaza Strip: about 365 square km (141 square miles), according to Britannica and PCBS.
• Combined: about 6,025 square km (2,326 square miles).
• Share of the total: the West Bank is about 94 percent of the land, Gaza about 6 percent.

How big is Palestine compared to a US state?

The closest match is Delaware. The US Census Bureau lists Delaware's total area as 2,489 square miles (6,446 square km), including water, and its land area as 1,949 square miles (5,047 square km).

No US state is as small as the Gaza Strip on its own. Our guide to how big Gaza is compares it with US cities instead; it is about the size of Las Vegas or Detroit.

• Delaware (2,489 square miles in total): the West Bank and Gaza together are about 93 percent of that, so slightly smaller.
• Delaware's land area only (1,949 square miles): the two territories together are about 19 percent larger.
• Rhode Island (1,545 square miles in total): Palestine is about 1.5 times the size.
• Connecticut (5,543 square miles in total): Palestine is about 42 percent of the size.
• The West Bank alone: about 88 percent of Delaware's total area. The CIA World Factbook described it as "slightly smaller than Delaware".

West Bank area and geography

The West Bank lies west of the Jordan River, between Israel and Jordan. It is landlocked. The archived CIA World Factbook lists 478 km of land boundaries: 330 km with Israel and 148 km with Jordan.

Britannica describes it as mostly north-south limestone hills averaging 700 to 900 meters (2,300 to 3,000 feet) high, falling away in the east to the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea is the lowest body of water on the surface of the Earth; the Factbook gives its level as 431 meters below sea level. The highest point, Khallat al Batrakh, is 1,020 meters.

The main Palestinian cities sit along the central line of hills: Nablus in the north, Ramallah just north of Jerusalem, and Bethlehem and Hebron to the south.

What are Areas A, B and C?

If you searched for "the area of A, B, C" or "C area", this is the answer. In 1995 the Oslo II agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization divided the West Bank into three zones for an interim period. Britannica summarizes them as follows.

The Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem describes Areas A and B as 165 separate "islands" of land, with Area C as the connected territory that surrounds them. The arrangement was meant to last five years while a final agreement was negotiated. It is still in place three decades later. East Jerusalem is outside the A, B, C system; Israel annexed it, a step most of the world does not recognize.

• Area A: Palestinian civil administration and Palestinian security control. It includes the main Palestinian cities.
• Area B: Palestinian civil administration with joint Israeli-Palestinian security control. It covers many towns and villages.
• Area C: Israeli civil and security control, including planning and building.

How big is Area C?

Area C is the largest of the three. B'Tselem puts it at 61 percent of the West Bank. Area A is commonly given as about 18 percent and Area B as about 21 percent, the figures used by Al Jazeera's explainer on the three areas.

Applied to a West Bank of 5,660 square km, those shares work out to roughly the following. These are our own calculations from the percentages, so treat them as approximate.

Area C contains most of the West Bank's open land, farmland and water resources, along with the Israeli settlements. According to B'Tselem, Israel has blocked Palestinian development in about 60 percent of Area C by designating land as state land, firing zones, nature reserves or settlement jurisdiction, and it rarely approves Palestinian building permits in the rest. Our explainer on West Bank settlements covers where the settlements are.

• Area A (about 18 percent): roughly 1,020 square km, or 390 square miles.
• Area B (about 21 percent): roughly 1,190 square km, or 460 square miles.
• Area C (about 61 percent): roughly 3,450 square km, or 1,330 square miles, which is larger than the land area of Rhode Island.

How many people live in Palestine?

PCBS estimated 5.56 million Palestinians in the State of Palestine at the end of 2025: 3.43 million in the West Bank and 2.13 million in the Gaza Strip. Gaza's population fell by about 10.6 percent against pre-war projections.

Worldwide, PCBS counts about 15.5 million Palestinians. Around 7.4 million live in historic Palestine, meaning the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, and about 8.1 million live elsewhere, most of them in Arab countries.

The West Bank figures above do not include Israeli settlers. The European Union's report on 2025 put the number of settlers in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, at more than 750,000.

A small place with large needs

A territory smaller than Delaware holds more than five and a half million people, and more than two million of them are in Gaza, on 6 percent of the land. That density is part of why the humanitarian situation in Gaza is so severe: there is very little space for displaced families to move to.

Fight for Palestine funds emergency aid in Gaza through local partner teams, including food, clean water, medical aid and shelter. You can see where we work or donate to support that work.