UNRWA’s Secret Archive Rescue: Safeguarding Palestinian Refugee History Amid War

From early 2024 to mid-2025 UNRWA conducted a ten-month, covert mission to extract paper archives stored in Gaza and East Jerusalem and relocate them to Jordan. Dozens of staff moved boxes by pickup trucks, air-lifted them on Jordanian military planes, and placed them in a secure Jordanian facility for digitisation.

The Guardian

Founded in 1949, UNRWA serves roughly 750,000 Palestinian refugees with health, education and food aid. Its archives contain original 1948 registration cards, birth, marriage and death certificates, and other records that allow refugees to trace family origins. Since the 2023 Hamas attack, Israel has repeatedly accused UNRWA of promoting anti-Israel curricula, colluding with Hamas, and, after a 2023 raid, alleged staff participation, leading to the dismissal of nine employees and, in January 2025, a law barring the agency from Israeli-occupied territories.

The Guardian

When Israeli forces ordered the evacuation of UNRWA’s Gaza office, staff left within hours, unable to take the archives. Acting director Sam Rose warned, “There was a real risk that the Israelis would move in and destroy them, or they would just be destroyed in a fire or an explosion or whatever.” Documents were shuttled in rented pickups to a Rafah warehouse, then smuggled into Egypt and finally flown to Amman by a Jordanian charity using military aircraft. The mission also faced daily cyber-attacks on UNRWA’s digital registration system.

The Guardian

In Amman, a Luxembourg-funded project employs more than 50 staff working in a cramped basement to scan the material. To date, almost 30 million documents have been digitised, enabling UNRWA to offer each refugee a family tree and to produce maps of 1948 displacement patterns.

The Guardian

The records provide the only contemporaneous evidence of Palestinian residence before 1948, a point contested in historical and legal debates. Historian Dr Anne Irfan noted, “The Palestinians are a stateless people and without a fully unified national archive … so the UNRWA archive has a particular significance for them.”

The Guardian

UNRWA senior official Roger Hearn said the archives’ destruction “would have been catastrophic” and stressed their importance for any durable solution to the conflict. Israeli officials have maintained that UNRWA’s alleged links to Hamas justify the agency’s expulsion and the legal restrictions imposed in 2025.

The Guardian

Right-wing groups in Israel have targeted UNRWA facilities with protests and arson, while Israeli authorities have pursued legal bans and obstruction campaigns, arguing the agency perpetuates refugee claims. International observers have warned that the loss of the archives would erase vital historical evidence.

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• “Their destruction would have been catastrophic … If there is ever a just and durable solution to this conflict, then this is the only evidence people can use to show there were once Palestinians living in a particular place,” — Roger Hearn, senior UNRWA official

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• “There was a real risk that the Israelis would move in and destroy them, or they would just be destroyed in a fire or an explosion or whatever,” — Sam Rose, acting director of UNRWA affairs in Gaza

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• “There are testimonies of how people were forced to flee in 1948, where they came from, where their property was, what was destroyed. Two hundred thousand came to Gaza in between 1948 and 1949, from all over Palestine,” — Jean-Pierre Filiu, professor of Middle-East Studies, Sciences Po

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• “Now [the archives] are out of Palestine, but at least they are protected,” — Jean-Pierre Filiu

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• “The Palestinians are a stateless people and without a fully unified national archive … so the Unrwa archive has a particular significance for them,” — Dr Anne Irfan, historian, UCL

The Guardian

UNRWA estimates that full digitisation and cataloguing will require another two years. The digital archive is expected to support legal claims, scholarly research, and future peace-process negotiations by providing verifiable evidence of displacement and property ownership.

The Guardian