Extract from ABC News
With the Israel-Gaza war raging on for nearly two weeks and a potential ground offensive looming, the world has its eyes on the tiny enclave.
The Gaza Strip is home to 2.1 million people and is densely populated.
Here's how its size and population compare to Australian cities.
What is the size of the Gaza Strip?
The Gaza Strip has a total land area of about 360 square kilometres.
It's 41 kilometres long from its northern border with Israel to Egypt down south, a distance just shy of a marathon run.
The small territory is 13 kilometres at its widest and about 10 kilometres at its narrowest.
To put that into context, it's less than half the size of Canberra.
It's about one-35th as big as Greater Sydney (12,368 square kilometres) and one-45th as big as Greater Brisbane (15,842 square kilometres).
In comparison to one of our most famous attractions, Gaza is about one-950th the size of The Great Barrier Reef, which covers about 348,000 square kilometres.
The Gaza Strip is about twice the size of Washington, DC (177 square kilometres), one-quarter the size of London (1,579 square kilometres) and one-10th the size of Cape Town (2,461 square kilometres).
It shares a 13-kilometre border with Egypt and a 59-kilometre border with Israel, and has a 40-kilometre coastline on the Mediterranean.
How many people live there?
Gaza is home to 2.1 million people.
Compared to Australian cities, that is closest to Perth's population of 2.2 million, as estimated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2023.
However, the Perth urban area is almost five times bigger.
Gaza has nearly five times the population of Canberra, estimated by the ABS to be 464,601 people in 2023, living within less than half the space.
The Gaza Strip is very densely populated, with an average of 8,121 people per square kilometre, according to a 2023 Demographia report, which looks at built-up urban areas rather than governmental jurisdictions.
That is similar to the Seoul capital area in South Korea or Cairo in Egypt.
In comparison, Australia's most densely populated urban area, Sydney, has 2,204 people per square metre, about a quarter of that in Gaza.
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