The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, or IMPACT-SE, said in a statement Wednesday that at least a hundred Hamas terrorists are graduates of the UNRWA education system, including two participants in the October 7 massacre of Israeli civilians.
UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestinian Refugees, is among the primary bodies in Gaza responsible for providing education, health care, and social services to the territory’s Palestinian population, and it administers about half the schools in the Gaza Strip.
The agency has become a charged topic since the outbreak of Israel’s ongoing war with Gaza, as Israel and Western democracies attempt to negotiate the tension between meeting the needs of Palestinian civilians and depriving Hamas of resources to use in attacks against Israelis. On October 16, there were reports, including from UNRWA's X (formerly Twitter) account, that "a group of people with trucks" had broken into an agency facility and stolen resources. The agency later retracted this account.
In 2022, IMPACT-SE published a report alleging that UNRWA curricula radicalize students, through texts and examples that convey antisemitic premises or glorify violence against Israelis and Jews generally.
No reference to Israel as a legitimate state
A review of the report, running 42 pages, provides "selected examples." Some of these involve explicit political ideology – for example, a Grade 8 social studies textbook that describes “the implantation of the Zionist entity in Palestine” as a consequence of European colonialism meant “to separate Arab Asia and Arab Africa with the aim of preventing Arab unity.”
Other examples are merely implicit, such as a grammar exercise for students in Grade 9 that uses as an example the sentence: ‘When the [Muslim] nation is negligent in protecting al-Aqsa, then the Jews will dare to defile it,” asking a technical question about the sentence’s syntax. Another grammar exercise, for Grade 8, prompts students to “find the subjunctive verb in the following sentences,” one of which is “The Palestinians sacrifice their blood to liberate Jerusalem.”
In addition to what the textbooks do say is the matter of what they don’t: there is no acknowledgment of Israel as an existing and legitimate state – only references to “the Zionist entity” or “the Zionist occupation.” Maps represent the entire area of Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank as one land, “Palestine.” Neither is there any encouragement of peace as the goal for resolving the conflict, according to IMPACT-SE, but instead only a military victory against “the Zionists.”