Although often silently, disability permeates refugeedom. In 2020, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, at least 12 million people with disability were in a condition of forced displacement. Historically, the Middle East has a significant number of refugees with disability, also among Palestinian refugees. Since its establishment in 1949 after the watershed events of the 1947-1949 war, the Palestinian nakba – the expulsion and fleeing of more than 750,000 Palestinian refugees from cities and villages erased or depopulated – and the creation of the State of Israel, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East was the main institution that implemented humanitarian assistance addressing Palestinian refugees with disability. This paper aims to unpack how UNRWA communicated its services and projects aimed at Palestinian refugees with disability, with a specific focus on visual production. The paper argues that photographs and videos were essential tools not only for fundraising goals but, most significantly, to create a visual representation of reality responding to UNRWA objectives of education, development and depoliticization of Palestinian refugees. Through scrutiny of the UNRWA Photo and Film archive, one of the most sizeable archives depicting refugees, the analysis will concentrate on the construction of the image of Palestinian refugees with disability. Firstly, the paper discusses some elements of the history of photography in Palestine since its diffusion in the late Ottoman period and its development during the British Mandate. Secondly, forms of photographic and video representation of disability by UNRWA in the 1950s-1960s are analysed. Thirdly, the new paradigm of disability that emerged in the 1970s-1980s, vehiculated in the 1981 United Nations International Year of Disabled Persons, is approached through a study of UNRWA photographs and videos. The changes deriving from the first intifada (1987–90), with a massive number of people made disabled by the military attacks, and the effects of the Oslo peace process phase in the 1990s are outlined, concluding with ethical reflections on making history of disability and photography. In doing so, this paper intends to contribute to the intersection of history of humanitarianism, disability, refugeedom and visual studies.