Convener: Professor Neil Ketchley
Speaker: Dr Valeria Cetorelli
In 1950-51, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) conducted a census to register those who had lost their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 war in Palestine –known in Arabic as al-Nakba, the catastrophe. The registration records from this census constituted the backbone of UNRWA’s operations at that time and the foundation on which registration records of subsequent generations of refugees have been built. However, they have so far never been thoroughly analysed. For 75 years, the original census cards remained archived in UNRWA field offices in Gaza City, East Jerusalem, Amman, Damascus and Beirut. Their scanning was completed only at the end of 2025, following the rescue of the Gaza City archive after the outbreak of hostilities in October 2023 and the transfer of the East Jerusalem archive to Amman due to the Israeli Parliament’s bills banning UNRWA in October 2024. The digitisation of the registration records contained in these cards is now underway through a semi-automated workflow with human-in-the-loop oversight. Once finalised, this project will make it possible to identify all refugees who were registered by the census and attest their place of origin in pre-1948 Palestine. It will also provide an evidentiary basis for reconstructing family lineages and substantiating the historical claims of the current Palestine refugee population.
Dr Valeria Cetorelli has been with UNRWA since 2018, serving six years as Head of Refugee Registration and Eligibility and currently as Deputy Director of Relief and Social Services. She holds a PhD in demography from the LSE and has extensive experience leveraging data to guide humanitarian assistance and development policies and advance human rights and international justice for conflict-affected and displaced populations. She has led large multidisciplinary teams, managed complex multimillion-dollar programmes, and published high-impact research. Prior to joining UNRWA, she worked as Demographic Statistician at UNESCWA and as Research Officer at the LSE Middle East Centre and at the Johns Hopkins Center for Refugee and Disaster Response.
