The population of Gaza has fallen by six per cent since the fighting with Israel began nearly 15 months ago as about 100,000 Palestinians left the enclave while more than 55,000 are presumed dead, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), Reuters reports.

Around 45,500 Palestinians, more than half of them women and children, have been killed since the fighting began but another 11,000 are missing, the bureau said, citing numbers from the Palestinian Health Ministry.

As such, the population of Gaza has declined by about 160,000 during the course of the fighting to 2.1 million, with more than a million or 47pc of the total children under the age of 18, the PCBS said.

It added that Israel has “raged a brutal aggression against Gaza targeting all kinds of life there; humans, buildings and vital infrastructure … entire families were erased from the civil register. There are catastrophic human and material losses.”

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