Jessica Cheung

Thank you so much, and I hope to follow you throughout the week.

Okay, very good.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

We'll touch base.

Because he's been here for so long, Mansour seems to be a kind of fixture in this place.

He scurries around these halls, doing a seemingly endless amount of press gaggles, shaking a seemingly endless amount of hands, meeting a seemingly endless amount of diplomats.

But sitting down with him, I realize that the U.N.

has long been a fixture in his life, too.

Onsor spent his childhood in Ramallah, in the West Bank.

His family was among the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were expelled or fled from their homes amid the wars surrounding the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, a period known to Palestinians as the Nakba.

And the U.N.

provided food, schools, and medical care to those displaced Palestinian families, including Mansour's.

Do you have an early memory about how you understood that Palestinians didn't have a state of your own?

In the 1950s, Mansour's father immigrated to the U.S.

He took a job as a steel worker in Youngstown, Ohio.

Mansour was around 17 years old when he followed his father here.

He went on to study at Youngstown State.

Throughout college, he was politically active, marching for civil rights, against the war in Vietnam, and seeing those movements create real change around him.

He started speaking out against Israel's occupation in the West Bank, in Gaza, trying to raise awareness of Palestinian rights.