The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) operates in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Jerusalem, as well as in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. It reportedly provides education to 533,000 children in its schools.1 According to UNWRA’s website, education alone takes up 58 percent of the organization’s budget.2
Under its mandate, UNRWA schools teach the curriculum and textbooks of the “host country,” UNRWA does not produce its own curricula.3 The Palestinian National Authority (PA) curriculum is taught in the 370 UNRWA-run schools across the Gaza Strip, West Bank, and Jerusalem, educating over 320,000 students as of 2019, according to UNRWA’s data.4
Along with other school curricula across the MENA region, IMPACT-se has been analyzing the PA school curriculum used by UNRWA for over two decades, assessing compliance with UN values, such as tolerance, non-violence, and peace-making. Most recently, reports and updates have been published annually since the Palestinian curriculum reform in 2016 and are freely available on IMPACT-se’s website (www.impact-se.org). Our extensive research of PA school textbooks has consistently shown a systematic insertion of violence, martyrdom, overt antisemitism, and jihad across all grades and subjects, with the proliferation of extreme nationalism and Islamist ideologies throughout the curriculum, including science and math textbooks; rejection of the possibility of peace with Israel; and the complete omission of any historical Jewish presence in the modern-day territories of Israel and the PA.5
This material is taught in UNRWA schools throughout the Palestinian Territories. Since its establishment, UNRWA has used the curriculum of the “host country” in which it operates. In the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Jerusalem, UNRWA uses the curriculum of the Palestinian Authority (PA). UNRWA officially claims that it “has no mandate to alter any host government curriculum or textbooks which are a matter of national sovereignty,” including those of the Palestinian Authority.6
As such, UNRWA acknowledges that students are exposed at any given moment to all the content existing in hard copy Palestinian Authority textbooks provided by UNRWA to students used either at school or at home as it does not alter the materials.
