A new report by UN Watch and the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) has found that teachers and schools at UNRWA, the UN agency that runs education and social services for Palestinian Arabs, regularly call to murder Jews, and create teaching materials that glorify terrorism, encourage martyrdom, demonize Israelis and incite antisemitism.
The joint report, which was published on Tuesday, uncovers 47 new cases of incitement by UNRWA staff, in breach of the agency’s stated policies of zero tolerance for racism, discrimination or antisemitism in its schools and educational materials.
The institutional teaching materials created by UNRWA’s own education departments and staff include over 300 pages of content labeled for use between 2021-2023, obtained from at least five separate and freely available open-source platforms, spanning grades 5, 6, 7 and 9 across 10 verified UNRWA schools.
The material carries UNRWA’s logo and the names of its schools and lists contributing UNRWA staff. They include school principals, vice principals, educational experts and teachers, who are all signed off on the violent and antisemitic content.
These materials have been kept off UNRWA’s new Digital Learning Platform which UNRWA claims is the sole source of learning materials self-produced by UNRWA. Yet they were distributed to hundreds of students through various platforms and channels, and taught in classrooms.
The report captures evidence taken from inside UNRWA classrooms, showing the teaching of these materials, and revealing how UNRWA’s own content directs students to study specific hateful passages in Palestinian textbooks — which the organization claims teachers are told to skip.
The report identifies 133 UNRWA educators and staff who were found to promote hate and violence on social media, and an additional 82 UNRWA teachers and other staff affiliated with over 30 UNRWA schools involved in drafting, supervising, approving, printing, and distributing hateful content to students.
The hatred is systemic at UNRWA, and its internal self-auditing mechanisms are not fit for purpose, alleges the report.
“With a budget of $1.6 billion, nearly 60% of which goes to education, and a staff of 30,000, the UN agency might be the most heavily funded educational undertaking in the history of international aid. And yet our report today demonstrates how UNRWA has consistently breached its duty of care to the children attending its schools,” said Marcus Sheff, CEO of IMPACT-se.
“UNRWA is obsessed by PR spin and fundraising, but disinterested in the extremism of its educational network. If it had wanted to stop the hate-teaching, UNRWA would have done so years ago,” he added.
“Today’s report provides detailed evidence on how UNRWA creates institutional educational content for Palestinian children that glorifies terrorism, incites to violence, demonizes Israel and spreads antisemitism,” said Sheff.
Examples cited in the report include: UNRWA’s Al-Zaytun Elementary School (Gaza) glorified terrorists and encouraged martyrdom. In March 2022 and September 2021, fifth graders were taught to glorify Dalal Mughrabi, a terrorist who carried out the 1978 Coastal Road Massacre in which 38 Israeli civilians including 13 children were killed. Photos taken of a classroom blackboard show how she is presented as “the fighting leader” and a “hero” who is to be honored by naming children and streets after her.
Likewise, in September 2022, 5th-graders at the school were taught to admire as a “martyr” and “hero” Izz Ad-Din Al-Qassem, the namesake of Hamas’ military wing, who had preached the murder of Jews. On November 20, 2022, photos of a classroom blackboard from Social Studies class in the 5th grade Class 9 of the fifth grade show a map labeled Palestine. The map includes the State of Israel – a UN member state, and marks areas and cities in Israel such as Haifa, Jaffa, Acre, and Beersheba as part of Palestine.
UNRWA’s Al-Maghazi Middle School for Boys B (Gaza) endorsed violence, demonized Israel, and encouraged martyrdom. In December 2022, an UNRWA-created Arabic reading comprehension exercise for 9th graders celebrated a Palestinian firebombing attack on a Jewish bus as a “barbecue party.”
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.
In 2021, a UN Watch report revealed that more than 100 of UNRWA’s educators and staff have publicly promoted antisemitism and violence on social media, and that on numerous occasions the agency has failed to dismiss teachers who incited such hate.