Nearly 30 Million Palestinian Refugee Records Digitised as Israel Bars UNRWA

Context In mid‑2024, UNRWA staff raced to save paper archives scattered across Gaza and East Jerusalem amid intensifying Israeli military action. Teams drove rented trucks through active combat zones, carried unmarked envelopes into Egypt, and airlifted boxes to safety. The effort involved dozens of workers in four countries and aimed to protect registration cards, birth, marriage and death certificates dating back generations. Officials warned that loss of the papers would erase the only tangible proof of Palestinian presence in specific locales. Despite earlier scanning projects, hundreds of thousands of records remained only on paper in 2023, leaving them exposed to fire, flood or deliberate destruction. The rescue operation therefore combined physical relocation with urgent digitisation to create a backup that could survive any future threat. Hearn, who coordinated the multi‑nation effort, stressed that the archives contain registration cards from 1948 that link families to specific towns and villages now inside Israel.

Key Facts - The digitisation effort has now captured nearly 30 million documents from the UNRWA Palestinian refugee archive. - Senior UNRWA official Roger Hearn said destroying the archives would be catastrophic and that they are the only evidence Palestinians can use to show they once lived in a particular place. - From January 2025, Israeli law bars UNRWA from operating in Israel and the Israeli‑occupied Palestinian territories.

What It Means The digital copy safeguards the historical record against physical destruction, but the ban on UNRWA limits the agency’s ability to provide services and to add new material to the archive. Observers will watch whether other countries step in to host UNRWA activities, how the digital archive is accessed by researchers and claimants, and whether any legal challenges arise against the Israeli prohibition.