UNRWA staff smuggled millions of Nakba records out of Gaza during Israel’s genocide: Report
The Cradle | May 22, 2026
A 10-month-long covert operation by staff of the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) retrieved millions of historical documents from Gaza and occupied East Jerusalem, preserving legal and historical records dating back to 1948 of Israel’s ethnic cleansing and land theft campaign, The Guardian reported on 14 May.
Dozens of staff across four countries carried documents past border checkpoints, airlifted boxes on military planes, and raced Israeli tanks to Rafah to save what could never be replaced.
The archive, kept inside UNRWA’s Gaza City compound, contained the original registration cards of Palestinians who sought refuge in Gaza during the Nakba, alongside birth, marriage, and death certificates spanning generations.
“There are testimonies of how people were forced to flee in 1948, where they came from, where their property was, what was destroyed,” said Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor specializing in West Asian studies.
“Two hundred thousand came to Gaza in between 1948 and 1949, from all over Palestine.”
The operation began days after Israeli forces ordered the evacuation of UNRWA’s Gaza City offices at the start of its assault on Gaza, with International staff being forced to leave on very short notice, with no time to take the documents.
After their forced evacuation, a small team returned and made three trips, driving trucks back through active bombardment to move the records south to a food warehouse in Rafah.
Evacuating the records from Gaza was further complicated as Egyptian authorities required Israeli approval before allowing the archives to cross the border, approval that UNRWA officials were certain would either be denied or used to seize the documents.
Meanwhile, UNRWA had been facing concurrent cyberattacks that threatened to wipe the agency’s servers and the digitized historical records.
“We genuinely thought we could see both the originals destroyed and any digital copies we had made. Then everything would have been gone for good,” said Roger Hearn, the senior UNRWA official who oversaw the rescue.
The documents were collated in Egypt and then airlifted to Amman aboard Jordanian military planes returning from aid deliveries, with the final cargo departing just two weeks before Israeli forces invaded Rafah in May 2024.
A parallel operation extracted a second set of archives from UNRWA’s East Jerusalem compound, which by early 2024 had become the target of arson attacks and mounting Israeli pressure to expel the agency.
Staff secretly transferred those records to Jordan over several months. In January 2025, new Israeli legislation formally barred UNRWA from operating in Israel and Israeli-occupied Palestine.
In Amman, more than 50 staff are currently scanning nearly 30 million documents by hand in a cramped basement facility, funded primarily by Luxembourg, with the digitization effort estimated to take another two years.
“Their destruction would have been catastrophic,” Hearn said. “If there is ever a just and durable solution to this crisis, then this is the only evidence people can use to show there were once Palestinians living in a particular place.”
Israel’s war on Gaza has amounted to a systematic assault on Palestinian cultural existence, targeting the physical and historical foundations of Palestinian identity in an apparent attempt to erase the people’s collective memory and presence from the land.
The destruction of mosques, churches, heritage sites, libraries, manuscripts, museums, cemeteries, and archival records forms part of a broader campaign to sever Palestinians from their history and national continuity.
These repeated attacks on the documentary and material traces of Palestinian life have turned cultural erasure itself into a weapon of war, with UNESCO verifying damage to scores of cultural and historical sites across Gaza since the genocide began in October 2023.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Featured Video
NATO attacked Russia; US being pushed out of the Middle East
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
Book Review
The Rape of Nanking: Massacre or Myth?
By Jonas E. Alexis • Unz Review • May 21, 2026
The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II by Iris Chang was unquestionably an incendiary and highly tendentious work that quickly generated considerable controversy in both the United States and Japan following its publication in 1997. The book received praise from major publications such as the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, the Chicago Tribune, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.
The book achieved such remarkable success that it prompted then fifty-year-old Ted Leonsis, vice chairman of AOL, to produce the documentary film Nanking, which he described as a “labor of love.”[1] According to Ted Leonsis, the film was intended to be comparable to Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.[2]
Chang, who was Chinese American, was only twenty-seven years old when she began writing The Rape of Nanking. However, Chang died by suicide in 2004 near Los Gatos at the age of thirty-six.[3] Before taking her own life in her automobile, Chang left three suicide notes… continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- UNRWA staff smuggled millions of Nakba records out of Gaza during Israel’s genocide: Report
- ‘Board of Peace’ plan accused of turning Gaza disarmament into Israeli land grab
- Russia Has Three Responses to Ukrainian Attack on Donbass Children – Expert
- Hunter Biden Tells Candace Owens His Father Blackmailed by Israel
- The logic of victory: Iran’s principled terms for end to imposed war define a new strategic reality
- Are we on the verge of a US-Iran deal?
- IRGC Navy coordinates safe passage of another 35 ships through Strait of Hormuz
- Revealed: USAID, NED & Open Society Quietly Bankroll Cuba’s “Independent” Media In Push for Regime Change
- The Rape of Nanking: Massacre or Myth?
- Douglas Macgregor: NATO Attacked Russia; U.S. Being Pushed Out of the Middle East
- If Americans Knew
- Pro-Israel commentator warns critics face ‘buzzsaw’ of ‘Jewish money’ after Massie defeat
- How Dumb Does Ted Cruz Think Americans Are?
- Amid global outrage at treatment of flotilla activists, Israeli Prison Service says abuse is standard procedure: Daily Update
- Autopsies of Gaza Medics Killed by Israeli Troops Show Some Were Shot in the Head
- U.S.: New Data Highlights AIPAC Ties to the U.S., Israeli Governments
- Joe Kent: Trump can’t end war until Israel taken out of the loop
- ‘Over the Border It Was Okay to Be Crazy’: IDF Soldiers Tell About the Army’s Moral Decay in Lebanon
- In Response To ICC Arrest Warrant, Israel’s Smotrich Orders the Destruction of a Palestinian Village
- Netanyahu claims Israeli “values” may include kidnapping but maybe not violence – Daily Update
- Student protest silencing goes to new extremes on US campuses
- No Tricks Zone
- Researchers Find Rapid Global Warming Phase At End Of Last Ice Age (Ca.18,000 Years Ago)
- Even The DNA Of Single-Celled Plankton Can Upend Alarmist Arctic Sea Ice Melt Claims
- Scandal: Although Climate Panic Is Canceled By IPCC, Europe’s Policymakers Continue With Their Crushing Policies
- How Once Hardcore Climate Alarmist Lucy Biggers Realized It Was All A Scam, Brainwashing
- German Expert: “No Climate Crisis” …”Warming Generally Better For Humanity”
- New Paleo Research: Modern ‘Climate Change’ Has Had No Apparent Impact On Precipitation Patterns
- 90% Subsidized… Bielefeld Germany’s €7 Million Hydrogen Garbage Truck Fleet Sits Idle
- New Study: Declining Trends In 1980-2023 Tropical Cyclone Frequency, Accumulated Energy
- 46 IPCC Scientists Break Rank, Publicly Challenge Long-Standing Dogmatic Climate Claims
- Another Study Links Warming To Cloud Forcing, Shortwave Radiation, Natural Atmospheric Circulation
Aletho News 