Abdel-Karim al-Alami was born in 1925 in the city of Lod and worked on the railroad. In the aftermath of the 1948 Nakba, al-Alami was forcibly displaced with his family to Ramallah and then to Jericho, and later relocated to Jerusalem. In 1949, he became the director of the Distribution Department in the Department of Social Affairs' Refugee Office, and in 1950, he held several positions in the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Al-Alami participated in the constitutive congress of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in 1964 in Jerusalem, was a member of the PLO National Council and became the director of the PLO Office in Jerusalem. He was murdered in the course of the June 1967 War.

Lina al-Alami kept a collection of photographs and documents of her father, Abdel-Karim al-Alami, documenting different stages of his and his family's lives in Lod and Jerusalem. The collection consists of three sections, where the photographs in the first section show the life and activities of al-Alami in Lod as a scout leader and a student, and his family life accompanied by his wife, Lawaheth Khatib, and his brothers. In the second section, the photographs focus on al-Alami's activity and work in the Department of Social Affairs in the aftermath of the 1948 Nakba and his supervision of distributing food items to the refugees. In the last section, the photographs concentrate on his activities as a member of the National Council of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and his work as the director of the PLO Office in Jerusalem. As for the documents, they include newspaper clippings covering al-Alami's activities, an election manifesto he published when he ran for the Jordanian parliamentary elections in the 1950s and several personal identification documents such as a passport, work card, identity card, and driver's license.