This paper explores correspondence between Palestinian prisoners of war (POWs) in Israeli camps and their family members, many of whom fled Palestine or were expelled by the Jewish armed forces. Thousands of Palestinians were interned in Israeli camps during the 1948 War, and as a recent article by Salman Abu Sitta and Terry Rempel suggests, most of these were noncombatants who were exploited for labor. The letters they sent their families via the Red Cross, and the letters family members sent back, were intercepted by the Israeli postal censorship, and were obtained by the author after years of petitioning the Israeli archives for their declassification. The correspondence captures the devastating conditions in the improvised refugee encampments that that sprung up in Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon and in Gaza during the war, and the attempts of the families’ breadwinners, locked in Israel, to locate their spouses and children who went missing. Another major concerns for letter writers were the houses and fields left behind, and whether they could locate other Palestinians who would safe keep those, for them, until their release. The paper chronicles not only the vignettes of life and hardship of Palestinians in the immediate aftermath of the Nakba, but also the work of the Israeli postal censorship, a relic of the British colonial rule in Palestine. By examining the topics that were the primary interest of censors, the paper shows that Israeli officials were deeply concerned about the unwavering demands of families to reunite with their loved ones and return to their villages, even if these villages had become part of the State of Israel.