A covert international operation involving secret border crossings, military flights and dangerous rescue missions under bombardment preserved one of the most important historical archives documenting the Palestinian refugee experience.
The archives belonged to United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, better known as Unrwa, and contained millions of documents chronicling the displacement, deaths, births, marriages and property histories of Palestinians forced from their homes during the creation of Israel in 1948. The operation to save them unfolded over ten months during Israel’s war on Gaza, which began after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel that killed around 1,200 people.
The records included original refugee registration cards, family documents and testimonies dating back generations. Many related directly to the Nakba of 1948, when approximately 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled during the war surrounding the establishment of Israel. Much of the archive had never been fully digitised and remained stored in paper form inside Unrwa facilities in Gaza City and East Jerusalem. Officials feared the documents could be destroyed in airstrikes, fires, cyberattacks or deliberate confiscation.
Roger Hearn, a senior Unrwa official who oversaw the operation, warned that the loss of the archives would have erased crucial evidence of Palestinian existence and displacement.
“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,” Hearn said.
Professor Jean-Pierre Filiu of Sciences Po said the records represented an irreplaceable testimony of the Palestinian experience during and after the Nakba.
“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,” Filiu said.
The rescue effort began shortly after Israeli forces invaded Gaza in late 2023. With bombardment intensifying across the enclave, Unrwa officials feared the archives could be permanently lost if Israeli troops reached the agency’s compound in Gaza City.
Sam Rose, the acting director of Unrwa affairs in Gaza, described the urgency of the situation.
“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,” Rose said.
Despite the dangers, small teams of Unrwa staff reportedly drove rented pickup trucks back into Gaza City under heavy bombardment to retrieve boxes of documents from the organisation’s headquarters. The archives were then transported south to a warehouse in Rafah near the Egyptian border.
At the same time, Unrwa officials feared cyber sabotage after previous attacks on the agency’s digital systems earlier in 2023. Hearn said there were concerns that both the physical archives and their scanned copies could disappear simultaneously.
“There was this very dangerous period where we were getting many, many [cyber]attacks every day and genuinely thought we could see both the originals destroyed and any digital copies we had made. Then everything would have been gone for good,” he said.
The next challenge was getting the archives out of Gaza without attracting Israeli attention. During late 2023 and early 2024, staff carrying international passports reportedly transported documents concealed in unmarked envelopes and luggage through border crossings into Egypt.
Rose explained how staff disguised the importance of the material during inspections.
“If anyone was stopped at the border, they just said they were carrying paperwork. There was mountains [of documents] to take out. Everyone was carrying stuff with them,” he said.
Over the following six months, the archives were assembled in Egypt before being flown to Jordan aboard military aircraft returning after aid deliveries to Gaza. The final shipments escaped Rafah only two weeks before Israeli tanks seized the crossing in May 2024, effectively sealing the route.
But Gaza was only part of the operation. Throughout early and mid-2024, Unrwa officials also feared losing access to the agency’s East Jerusalem compound as Israeli authorities intensified efforts against the organisation. The compound became the focus of protests, arson attacks and political campaigns demanding Unrwa’s expulsion.
“In East Jerusalem, we had months of warnings that we would lose access [to our offices],” Rose said.
With diplomatic efforts to secure alternative storage failing, staff quietly removed additional archives from East Jerusalem over several months and transferred them to Jordan before Israeli legislation introduced in January 2025 barred Unrwa from operating in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.
In Amman, more than 50 Unrwa employees have since worked to digitise nearly 30 million documents in a preservation project funded largely by Luxembourg. Officials estimate the work could take another two years to complete and eventually allow Palestinian refugees to trace family histories and map patterns of displacement dating back to 1948.
Filiu said the successful rescue ensured a vital part of Palestinian history survived despite the destruction unfolding in Gaza.
“Now [the archives] are out of Palestine, but at least they are protected,” he said.
Dr Anne Irfan of University College London said the archive held immense national significance for Palestinians, particularly because they remain a stateless people without a unified national archive.
“The Palestinians are a stateless people and without a fully unified national archive … so the Unrwa archive has a particular significance for them,” Irfan said.
She added that the digitised records could reshape historical understanding of the conflict and its consequences.
“It is highly contested history, and history that has potentially very real ramifications for the present,” Irfan said.