Over the past five years, it is estimated that more than 15-thousand elderly South Koreans have passed away while waiting to reunite with their family members who were split up by the Korean War and living in North Korea.

Rep. Yang Kyung-sook of the main opposition Democratic Party released the data from the unification ministry on Sunday.

According to the data, of the 133-thousand-680 people on the waiting list for family reunions as of the end of May, 92-thousand-534 or 69-point-two percent, have died. One-thouand-483 people died during the first five months of this year.

About 16-thousand applicants are estimated to have died since the last family reunions in August 2018, considering that 15-thousand-313 applicants have died since 2019 and the annual death toll in recent years is between 34-hundred and 37-hundred.

The number of surviving people on the waiting list, which stood at 41-thousand-146 as of the end of May, is expected to fall rapidly, with 67 percent of the remaining survivors aged 80 and older.

Since the first inter-Korean summit in 2000, the two sides have held 21 rounds of in-person family reunion events, including the latest one in August 2018. Since then, almost all forms of exchanges have been halted following the collapsed summit between the North and the United States in Hanoi in February 2019.