A report detailing the connection between the education received in UNRWA schools in the Gaza Strip and the October 7 massacres carried out by Hamas in southern Israel will be presented to the US House of Representatives on Wednesday.
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The 123-page report was released by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, known as IMPACT-SE, an Israeli NGO that analyzes school textbooks and teaching curriculums to determine whether they conform with international standards derived from UNESCO's declarations and resolutions, with the aim of preventing the radicalization of children and encouraging tolerance, pluralism and peaceful conflict resolution.
According to the report, titled "UNRWA Education: Textbooks and Terror," education takes up 58% of the budget of UNRWA, the United Nations' agency for Palestinian refugees. It says that UNRWA operates 183 schools in the Gaza Strip, catering to more than 286,000 students, and those schools use the Palestinian Authority's curriculum, which is taught across the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The report said that, despite reforms in 2016, the PA's textbooks "have remained openly antisemitic and continue to encourage violence, jihad and martyrdom, while peace is not taught as preferable or even possible. Extreme nationalism and Islamist ideologies proliferate throughout the curriculum, including in science and math textbooks."
The report said that some 82 UNRWA teachers and other staff in over 30 schools were involved in drafting, approving and distributing "hateful content" in violation of UN, UNESCO and UNRWA standards. One example was an UNRWA-created Arabic reading comprehension exercise for ninth-grade students at UNRWA's Al-Maghazi Middle School for Boys B in Gaza, which celebrated a Palestinian firebombing attack on a Jewish bus as a “barbecue party.” Another example was at UNRWA’s Al-Zaytun Elementary School in Gaza, where fifth grade students were taught to glorify Dalal Mughrabi, a terrorist who in 1978 carried out a civilian bus bombing on Israel's Coastal Road in which 38 Israeli civilians, including 13 children, were murdered.
IMPACT-SE CEO Marcus Sheff told The Media Line that the most significant funding for UNRWA comes from the United States.
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Glorification of terrorist Dalal Mughrabi, who in 1978 carried out a civilian bus bombing in which 38 Israeli civilians were killed
"There is no question in anyone's mind that, given that the majority of UNRWA's funding goes to education, given that the education is geared toward inciting whole generations of Palestinians to commit the kind of unspeakable acts of terror that we saw, there needs to be a direct link between international funding of UNRWA and an absolute, iron-flat, not just guarantee, but evidence that, once and for all, UNRWA stops teaching this curriculum," Sheff said.
"We need that to end, and it needs to end right now. The international community has the power to end it because they are financially supporting it. That is the absolute bottom [line]. There cannot be one single day more of hate teaching," he said.
Sheff will present the report on Wednesday to Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., a member of the House Armed Services Committee, hoping to create a change in the US approach to UNRWA.
He said the Oct. 7 massacres were an outcome of the content taught to Palestinian children at the UNRWA schools.
"We have been warning for years that Palestinian schools in Gaza and the West Bank have indoctrinated to extreme Jew hate and incited students to murder," he said. "What we saw was the result of the years and years and years of indoctrination."
UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, was created by the United Nations in 1949 to carry out direct assistance programs for Palestinian refugees and their descendants in the Gaza Strip, West Bank, East Jerusalem, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. The refugees and their descendants now number close to 6 million people, and UNRWA employs over 30,000 people. Its funding mostly comes from voluntary donations of UN member nations. UNRWA is the only UN agency dedicated to helping refugees from a specific region or conflict, and it is separate from the UNHCR, established in 1950 as the main agency to aid all other refugees worldwide.
The IMPACT-SE report focuses on matters that directly connect UNRWA's education system to the October 7 attacks. It lists over 100 UNRWA school graduates who carried out the attacks and are recognized by Hamas as “martyrs.” A UNRWA diploma was found in the car of one of the terrorists.
The report also shows that UNRWA staff and teachers joined the massacre celebrations, saying that at least 14 UNRWA school staff members publicly praised the attacks on social media.
Mahmoud Abu Adhm, an UNRWA employee in Gaza, posted several videos of atrocities and wrote in one of his posts, citing Islamic texts: "Do not walk past a captive who has not been given amnesty without striking off his neck so as to terrorize the enemy.”
The report also reiterates years of warnings about the Jew-hating content and how UNRWA teaching materials glorify violence, encourage anti-Semitism and promote jihad.
"You can see the link between these lessons drilled into the heads of school students at UNRWA schools in Gaza and what unfolded on October 7," Sheff said.
He said he was not surprised that graduates of those schools executed the bloodshed in Israel.
"We warned that there will be a terrible outcome and that is what you saw. Hamas made its intentions crystal-clear in Arabic. We read it in the textbooks, but the damage is done. It's unspeakable damage," Sheff said.
He said the international community is aware of the problems and on many occasions has acted, with the European Union condemning the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA five times for teaching hate, and with individual European countries taking action in their parliaments, including issuing complaints from their governments to the Palestinian Authority and to UNRWA, and even dropping and freezing their funding.
However, he said that the US funds are the most significant, and he is hoping to create a change in the US approach to demand guarantees that the curriculum will be changed in the UNRWA schools in Gaza and the West Bank.
Sheff said that after the current war ends, as part of the rehabilitation of Gaza there should be a commitment to education based on UNESCO's revised standards of peace and tolerance.
"School textbooks are key to creating a tolerant society of the future. They are uniquely authoritative. They carry the values, they carry the identity of the government, and all adults have a duty to pass [this] down to the next generation," he said.
Sheff praised some Middle Eastern countries that have reformed their school curriculums to comply with UNESCO's standards of peace and tolerance.
"There are remarkable reforms in the curricula of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Morocco," he said.
However, Sheff asserted that the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA have gone the other way.
He said that in 2016, "the Palestinian Authority rewrote the textbooks and made them even worse than they were before, completely in opposition to all the other countries in the region, who, at the same time, had begun thinking about the necessity for peace and tolerance in education."
Asked about UNRWA's response to the condemnations, he said that the organization claims it has to teach the curriculum of "the host nation."
"This is not the case, it's just ‘best practice’ and not part of the UN's directives," Sheff said.
"Time and time again, they have been told by the international community that change is necessary, and time and time again, instead of rewriting the curriculum to take out the hate they simply said: 'We cannot because it is the host nation's curriculum.' That's not good enough. They hid behind bureaucratic gobbledy-gook instead of taking the duty of care as educators,” he concluded.
Reprinted with permission from The Media Line.