Millions of documents chronicling the Nakba (catastrophe) and the history of Palestinian refugees since their enforced displacement by Israel in 1948 were secretly evacuated from Gaza and occupied Jerusalem during a covert months-long operation led by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
The mission was carried out amid fears the archive could be destroyed, seized, or lost during Israel’s war on Gaza.
The operation lasted around ten months and involved dozens of staff members from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) across at least four countries, according to a report published by The Guardian. The mission involved transporting documents under bombardment from Gaza to Egypt before they were flown to Jordan aboard military aircraft.
The archive includes original refugee registration cards dating back to the Nakba, which refers to the violent killing and mass expulsion of at least 700,000 Palestinians by Zionist militias to pave the way for the creation of Israel in 1948.
Other documents include birth, marriage, and death certificates spanning generations of Palestinian families.
The documents could allow descendants of displaced Palestinians to trace family origins and property records inside present-day Israel.
Roger Heearn, a senior UNRWA official who oversaw the operation, told The Guardian that "the destruction of these documents would have been catastrophic".
"If there is ever to be a just and lasting solution to this conflict, this is the only evidence people can use to prove there were Palestinians living somewhere," he said.
The report said the first phase of the operation began shortly after Israel launched its ground invasion of Gaza and ordered the evacuation of UNRWA offices in Gaza City.
International staff reportedly left within hours and were unable to remove the archive, prompting fears the records could either be seized by Israeli forces or destroyed in strikes.
"There was a real risk the Israelis would storm the place and destroy the documents, or that they would be destroyed in a fire or explosion," Sam Rose, acting director of UNRWA affairs in Gaza, told the newspaper.
Heearn also said the agency was subjected to "a huge number of cyberattacks every day", raising concerns that both physical and digital copies of the archive could be lost.
According to the report, a small team of UNRWA employees later returned to the agency compound in Gaza City using rented pickup trucks, while bombardment continued, carrying out three trips to move the documents south to a warehouse in Rafah near the Egyptian border.
Egypt reportedly refused to allow the archive to leave Gaza without consulting Israel, while UNRWA officials feared Israeli authorities would immediately recognise the significance of the documents and confiscate them.
The officials reportedly recalled how Israeli forces seized the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s archives from Beirut during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
The report said employees carrying foreign passports were eventually tasked with transporting the documents discreetly across the border.
"If someone was stopped at the crossing, they would just say they were carrying papers," Rose said. "There were mountains of documents that had to be moved. Everyone was carrying something."
The records were reportedly collected in Egypt over six months before being flown to Jordan through a Jordanian charity using Royal Jordanian Air Force planes returning from aid missions to Gaza.
The final shipment left only weeks before Israeli tanks entered Rafah in May 2024, closing the route entirely, according to the report.
A separate cache of documents stored at UNRWA’s compound in occupied Jerusalem was also secretly transferred to Jordan after the site was targeted by protests and alleged arson attacks amid escalating Israeli efforts to curtail the agency’s operations.
New Israeli laws banning UNRWA’s work in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories came into effect in January 2025. The Guardian reported that more than 50 staff members are now working in a basement facility in Amman, funded largely by Luxembourg, to manually digitise the refugee archive.
Around 30 million documents have so far been digitised, with UNRWA ultimately aiming to provide Palestinian refugees with family trees and supporting records, as well as maps documenting patterns of displacement during the Nakba.
The report comes as Palestinians and activists around the world mark the 78th anniversary of the Nakba, with many engaging in educational events, protests, and vigils, as well as recalling memories from their cities and villages in Palestine.