Palestinian refugees will soon have access to an online genealogical archive that will allow them to explore long-lost family connections going back as far as 1948, when more than 750,000 Palestinians were displaced and Israel was created on their lands.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), the agency responsible for providing Palestinian refugees with services since 1948, managed to save its archives from the Gaza Strip, which Israel has bombed into rubble since October 7, 2023, and the West Bank, where Israel has banned UNRWA and its staff (see Escalating Israeli Attacks against UNRWA Threaten Its Survival and Is There a Legal Basis for Israel’s UNRWA Ban?).

Having already been evacuated, a team of international staff from UNRWA returned to Gaza City to rescue the organization’s archives from destruction.1 The team made three trips in October 2023, at the start of the genocide in Gaza, to transport the records from UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters to their temporary offices in Rafah, along the border with Egypt. There, they loaded over 200 boxes of documents into three UN trucks and sent them to a food warehouse in Rafah, where they could be transported out of Gaza into Egypt.2

Certain that Egypt would not allow UNRWA to take its records out of Gaza without Israel’s consultation, international staff simply said they were carrying paperwork when stopped at the border into Egypt. Over the next six months, UNRWA’s archives were airlifted out of Egypt to Amman via a Jordanian charity delivering aid to Gaza on the Hashemite Kingdom’s military planes.3

But that was just the first part of UNRWA’s mission. From early summer 2024, staff now had to transfer archives from its occupied West Bank headquarters in East Jerusalem to the agency’s Amman offices, as Israeli threats to ban UNRWA increased. UNRWA succeeded in moving all the archives—from both Gaza and East Jerusalem—to Jordan by January 2025, when Israel’s law prohibiting UNRWA operations on its soil came into force and international staff had to relocate to Amman after Israel refused to renew their visas.4 (For the latest in Israel’s steps to erase UNRWA from the occupied Palestinian Territories, see Israel Advances Plan to Demolish UNRWA Vo-Tech School.)

Now safe in Jordan, the trove of 30 million documents has been digitally scanned into UNRWA’s systems, a source close to the matter told Jerusalem Story.5 This has come as quite a relief to the refugee agency, as hundreds of thousands of its records prior to the launch of Israel’s war on Gaza were only saved on paper.6 UNRWA confirmed to Jerusalem Story that these documents cover Palestinian refugees in all the areas it has been administering, not only the West Bank and Gaza.

In 1950, UNRWA conducted a census of all the Palestinian refugees, gathering detailed information on those whom it was serving, which it continued to augment. In 2010, UNRWA changed to an electronic registration system, but there was no evidence to connect those records with the paper files of their predecessors, those refugees who had originally been displaced. In addition, UNRWA’s systems were being hacked regularly, raising fears that this critical information might be damaged or lost.

Now that the files are all digital, UNRWA is working on putting them into a searchable database that could be “mind-bendingly” significant in determining what happened in villages where massacres were committed by Zionist forces and where Palestinians fled. By the end of 2027, sources expect to identify—using text readers and other tools—all of the living refugees from 1948 in the digital files.

“The Palestinian people were dispossessed in ’48—displaced [and] dispersed due to a deliberate strategy by Israel, and they’ve remained stateless since then,” Dr. Anne Irfan, a lecturer at the University College London and scholar focused on Palestinian refugee rights, told Jerusalem Story. “As a result, there’s no unified Palestinian national archive that contains the records of the Palestinian people en masse. There are limited archival collections, particularly under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority (PA) but there’s nothing really unified. So the UNRWA archive is really important, because it’s in some ways the closest thing that exists to that . . . it has the records of Palestinian refugees across the region,” says Irfan.7

Another early archive exists, says Irfan, those of the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNSCOP), which was mandated to seek out political solutions for the Palestinian refugees. That archive is stored at UN headquarters in New York, but no one is currently allowed access to it.

The rescue of the archives is even more essential in light of Israel’s pattern of erasing Palestinian history. It destroyed private archives kept by Zionist militias in the late 1940s to the early 1950s and captured the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) archives during its invasion and subsequent occupation of Lebanon in 1982.8

The UNRWA audiovisual collection comprises photographs and films taken over six decades, from the end of the 20th century to the beginning of the 21st.9 The images provide proof of the Nakba, the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes from 1947 to 1950 by Zionist paramilitary groups and then Israeli forces, and the Naksa, the 1967 expulsion of Palestinians that occurred after Israel occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. The archives’ organizational collection includes documents with refugees’ demographic data like family composition, birthdate, birthplace, and employment, as well as UNRWA staff correspondence. The third archival collection contains refugee registration documentation outlining the services afforded to refugees.10

“The original registration files also contain information about which towns and villages people were expelled and displaced from in Palestine. So, in that sense, it provides a kind of a direct written record for Palestinians today that takes them back to Palestine and to ’48,” Irfan told Jerusalem Story. “It tells us in a lot of ways the story of the Palestinian refugees’ struggle in exile, because UNRWA in so many ways was the kind of de facto quasi government or even quasi state for the refugees for so many years. It really provides evidence of what it was that the refugees prioritized, what they saw was important, and what was happening in the camps.”

“There could be different branches of the family in all these different countries [Palestinians fled to Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon, where UNRWA provided support—Ed.], and they are unable to physically reach one another or even possibly to digitally reach one another,” Irfan said. “So it can also actually be a way to kind of counter some of that dispersal by helping Palestinians piece together evidence from different parts of their families.”

Palestinian refugees, like all refugees, have the right to one of three “durable solutions.”11 These are to return to their country of origin, to resettle in a third country, or to become a citizen of the country where they sought shelter. UNRWA is very clear that it is not mandated to seek durable solutions for Palestinian refugees, leaving that to other UN bodies and political actors.12

Nevertheless, the UNRWA records are critical in helping Palestinian refugees enact their right of return or another agreed-upon solution, if a final settlement is reached between Palestine and Israel.

“They can be used as evidence for Palestinian refugees to claim their rights in whatever form that is. If there were to be any final resolution . . . they could be used as evidence as part of those conversations,” Irfan said.