More than six million Palestinian refugees are registered with the UN refugee agency UNRWA, according to official figures.

In a statement marking World Refugee Day, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics said 2.5 million refugees live in the occupied West Bank and besieged Gaza, constituting 42 percent of the registered Palestinian refugees.

The statement said that refugees comprise around 66 percent and 26.3 percent of the population of Gaza and the West Bank respectively.

Unregistered refugees

According to the statement, around 40.2 Palestinian refugees in the diaspora live in Jordan, 9.7 percent live in Syria and 8.2 percent in Lebanon.

“These estimates represent the minimum number of Palestinian refugees, taking into account that they are unregistered refugees, as this number does not include those Palestinians who were displaced after 1949 until the eve of the war of June 1967,” the statement said.

“It also does not include Palestinians who left or were deported in 1967 on the grounds of war and those who were not refugees in the first place.”