The European Parliament on Wednesday adopted a resolution condemning the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) for teaching hate and violence in Palestinian Authority (PA) schools, i24NEWS reports.
The resolution expresses concern "about the hate speech and violence taught in Palestinian school textbooks and used in schools by UNRWA" and insists that financial aid be conditioned on the removal of educational materials that promote hatred and incitement to violence.
"This is a really important step in the fight to prevent UNRWA from inciting many thousands of children every school-day to violence, extremism and antisemitism," said Marcus Sheff, CEO of IMPACT-se, a non-profit organization that monitors the content of school textbooks.
The legislation passed despite lobbying efforts against it by UNRWA and the PA, including by PA cabinet leader Mohammad Shtayyeh, who appeared before the parliament’s Committee of Foreign Affairs a week before the vote.
Created in 1949, UNRWA supplies aid to more than three million of the five million registered “Palestinian refugees” in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and territories assigned to the Palestinian Authority.
However, it is also notorious for its anti-Israel activities. During the 2014 counterterrorism Operation Protective Edge, Hamas rockets were discovered inside a school building run by UNRWA.
Likewise, a booby-trapped UNRWA clinic was detonated, killing three IDF soldiers. Aside from the massive amounts of explosives hidden in the walls of the clinic, it was revealed that it stood on top of dozens of terror tunnels, showing how UNRWA is closely embedded with Hamas.
The US, which was previously UNRWA's largest contributor, cut a full $300 million in funding to the agency in 2018, when Donald Trump was President. However, the Biden Administration recently announced it intends to resume aid to UNRWA as well as other aid to the Palestinian Authority which was suspended by the Trump Administration.