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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Jason Burke International security correspondent

The secret mission to rescue the UN’s vital Palestinian refugee archive

A black and white photograph of Palestinian refugees in 1948 walking along a rural road.
Refugees in 1948 fleeing a village in what is now Galilee, northern Israel. Photograph: Reuters

East Jerusalem to Amman should have been an easy trip: a short drive down to the Dead Sea, across the border checkpoint and swiftly on to the Jordanian capital.

But in the early summer of 2024, the distance appeared an almost insurmountable obstacle to humanitarian workers from Unrwa (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees), as they sought to safeguard huge quantities of archival documents vitally important to decades of recent Palestinian history.

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