As Gazans return to school, study finds their PA textbooks still rife with incitement
Despite pledge by Ramallah to revise curriculum, materials provided to Gazans continue to glorify martyrdom, feature antisemitic rhetoric in subjects from history to math, watchdog says
Nurit Yohanan is The Times of Israel's Palestinian and Arab world correspondent
For nearly a year after war broke out in Gaza, following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, invasion and slaughter in southern Israel, the Strip’s approximately 625,000 school-aged children were left with almost no formal education.
To address the lack of schooling, the Palestinian Authority’s Education Ministry rolled out a series of online textbooks tailored to Gazan students on September 15, 2024, largely made up of condensed versions of educational material previously distributed in the Strip.
According to the PA, whose textbooks are used by most Gaza schools, including many run by UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine), the materials focus on “essential subjects and fundamental concepts.”
But a new report by an Israeli- and UK-based watchdog group that monitors educational content for extremist content found that the books also include antisemitic rhetoric, promote jihad and martyrdom, and have materials that dehumanize Israelis, incorporated into everything from literature to math.
“Palestinian classrooms remain a breeding ground for extremism, with new educational materials reinforcing the same old dangerous narratives,” said Marcus Sheff, who heads the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, known by the acronym IMPACT-se.
In February, the PA said that 290,000 Gazan students had logged into the remote education system over the previous months using a unique ID.
That same month, amid a ceasefire between Israel and the Hamas terror group, some in-person schooling returned, largely in facilities that survived the war or in displacement camps or schools established with money from Arab countries. The schools were instructed by the PA Education Ministry to continue using the materials in printed form.
The continued use of texts deemed problematic raises questions about the PA’s promises to reform its educational curriculum in the face of repeated complaints from European donor countries over the content of textbooks and other teaching materials, many of which have been flagged by IMPACT-se in the past.
In July, the European Union announced that it would provide the PA with €400 million in grants and loans to help cover fiscal shortfalls, “subject to progress in the implementation of the reform agenda of the Palestinian Authority.”
Among the reforms listed in a letter of intent signed by EU and PA representatives is “modernization of the curriculum.” But no such reforms have taken place, according to the IMPACT-se report.
“This moment was the acid test for the Palestinian Authority. It signed an agreement with the European Union committing to reform its curriculum. Instead, we see once again that the PA continues to embed hatred and violence in its curriculum,” said Sheff.
In September, Abdul Hakim Abu Jamous, a senior PA education official told the Palestinian Al-Quds newspaper that Ramallah had never agreed to the EU’s demands for the curriculum. “The PA Ministry of Education is fully committed to preserving the independence of the Palestinian curriculum, and works according to standards that ensure that students’ needs are met, without any external pressures,” he said.
The EU said in November that €389 million of the package had been disbursed. The European Commissioner for the Mediterranean, Dubravka Šuica, recently announced that a high-level EU–PA dialogue on “reform achievements” is scheduled for Brussels in April.
An official source in the European Union told the Times of Israel this week: “The Palestinian Authority has committed to undertaking substantial and credible reforms, inter alia, reforming the education curriculum. The issue of the reform of the education curricula is covered in the action plan developed by the PA and consequently will be addressed also as part of the EU multi-year program. The PA is committed to carrying out a comprehensive curriculum reform to ensure full compliance of all education material with UNESCO standards of peace, tolerance, coexistence and non-violence.”
Education to martyrdom in math classes
Among the passages flagged by IMPACT-se is an 11th-grade history text that claims Zionists “used false claims” to justify their connection to the land while establishing a “Zionist settlement in Palestine.”
These “false claims” include “first, that Jews, despite belonging to various countries and societies, represent a single national group characterized by Semitic ethnic traits… and that there is no solution to the Jewish problem other than the establishment of a Jewish state in the Promised Land (Palestine).”
It also refers to the Jewish settlement of the land as “Zionist colonialism… in Palestine.”
Educational material for 12th graders on Islam includes a religious text interpreting the Quran that portrays Jews as liars and deceivers. A discussion question asks whether a warning about resisting “the temptation of enemies” refers only to Jews.
According to IMPACT-se, the textbooks glorify martyrdom and violence, including a first-grade reading exercise that uses the word “shahid,” or martyr, to teach an Arabic letter. In a second-grade Arabic textbook, a poem tells of a boy and girl pledging to “carry the flame of the revolution,” as they go from Haifa to Jaffa to Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque.
An 11th-grade reading exercise includes “Martyrs of the Intifada” by Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan, which praises stone-throwers during the First Intifada. An 11th-grade history textbook describes the high Palestinian death toll in the First Intifada as “fuel that powered the uprising.”
“The blood of every martyr gave the Intifada the strength to continue,” the text reads.
The glorification of jihad and martyrdom extends even into arithmetic, IMPACT-se found. Fourth and ninth-grade math textbooks include problems requiring students to calculate the number of martyrs killed over a given period.
Meanwhile, at least three maps found in the textbooks omit Israel, instead terming the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River as Palestine. An 11th-grade map also refers to 1988 as the year that Palestine was founded, referring to the Palestine Liberation Organization’s largely nugatory declaration of independence that year.
Glorification of the war on the class chalkboard
Beyond the online textbooks, the IMPACT-se report claimed to find images and videos from schools that opened since February in which students are exposed to materials and other content inciting violence against Jews or Israel.
According to Mahmoud Matar, the PA Education Ministry’s representative in Gaza, 93% of all schools in the Strip were destroyed in the fighting that was sparked on October 7, 2023, with Hamas’s deadly invasion of southern Israel.
But in February, as a ceasefire took hold, the PA announced that it was opening 680 learning centers across the Strip. To cope with demand, students must attend in shifts, going for a limited number of hours a few days a week.
In Khan Younis, students celebrated a school’s opening shortly after the start of a ceasefire by staging a dance to a song glorifying Palestinian resistance, with moves mimicking throats being slit and rocks being thrown, according to video shared online.
In Gaza City’s al-Nasr Elementary, a photo shows a poem written on a blackboard with text glorifying Palestinian perseverance amid the war. “You are the flood,” it reads, in direct reference to the al-Aqsa Flood, Hamas’s name for the October 7 massacre, during which thousands of terrorists stormed into southern communities, killing 1,200 people — mostly civilians — and kidnapping 251 more, while carrying out brutal atrocities like rape and torture.
Footage examined by IMPACT-se also showed that many schools were continuing to use older textbooks, which also contain incitement to violence and terrorism. The books are also used in 130 temporary learning centers for approximately 50,000 students opened by UNRWA in early March.
In one video, 12th graders are seen learning from a textbook featuring a passage in which a father instructs his son to return to Haifa, even through violence.
Students in an 11th-grade classroom are seen in a photo holding a history textbook that describes the September 11, 2001 attacks as “an excuse for the United States to avoid its commitments and impose its priorities on the world, turning it into a global policeman.”
UNRWA, which has long used the PA’s textbooks and educated around half of Gaza’s students before the war, did not respond to a request for a comment.
“Palestinian classrooms remain a breeding ground for extremism, with new educational materials reinforcing the same old dangerous narratives,” Sheff said.
The Times of Israel Community.