UN refugee agency unveils Palestinian archive

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees has unveiled a trove of pictures and film captured over more than 60 years chronicling the collective memory of those who fled or were forced into exile.
Established in 1949 to help Palestinian refugees who lost their homes when the state of Israel was created a year earlier, UNRWA has digitised the archive and put it on display in east Jerusalem.
More than half a million negatives, prints, slides, films and videocassettes collected by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency show men, women and children eking out new lives in refugee camps across the Middle East.

Called "The Long Journey," a collection of the works has been on display at the Al-Ma'mal Centre in east Jerusalem since Thursday.
"This project is important for the history of Palestine and Palestinians, in order to defend and preserve their identity," UNRWA commissioner general Filipo Grandi said at the launch of the exhibit.
"It is a contribution for building a national heritage" and "a beautiful project to help the Palestinian diaspora to preserve their identity."

Former UNRWA filmmaker and photographer George Nehmeh contributed over the years countless pictures and videos of refugees and landscape, some of which no longer exists.

Nehmeh, a Lebanese, prepared a special documentary for the exhibit, in which he says "each frame is a snapshot of history that is indelibly part of the Middle East."
At the onset of the 1970s Nehmeh took pictures of refugees in the Gaza Strip's Khan Yunis camp and the Baqaa camp just outside Amman.
Forty years later he went back in search of some of them.
A skeletal, dehydrated year-old baby he once photographed clutching his mother is now a father of five, and the documentary shows Nehmeh reunited with him in Gaza.
Another snapshots shows a couple who have fled Jericho after the 1967 Six Day War to the misery of a refugee camp.

Now they proudly boast 70 to 80 grandchildren and great grandchildren.
UNRWA is estimated to care for about five million Palestinian refugees in impoverished camps in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Jordan and now war-hit Syria.
Because of its historical and cultural significance, the archive has been inscribed UNESCO'S "Memory of the World" list since 2009.