Palestinian Authority schools are joyously celebrating the horrors of the October 7 massacre in song, coloring books and plays, a new report reveals.
At least 11 schools, including eight operated by the P.A. in Judea and Samaria, commonly known as the West Bank, have enthusiastically celebrated the horrific Hamas attack, which killed 1,200 persons in Israel, mainly civilians, the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) said in its report published on Thursday.
This follows years of P.A. schools teaching hate. The P.A. curriculum is replete with antisemitism, incitement to violence, demonization of Israel and promotion of jihad, which IMPACT-se has documented.
The P.A. curriculum is taught throughout Judea and Samaria and also in the Gaza Strip, indicating Hamas approval of its contents.
“Schools operated by the Palestinian Authority are teaching the same curriculum as that studied by the thousands of Oct. 7 terrorists from Gaza, and are publicly celebrating the unspeakable atrocities,” IMPACT-se CEO Marcus Sheff, said in a statement.
“It is critical that not a single cent of international aid, including European Union funds, continues to fuel this deadly process of murderous indoctrination,” he added.
The European Union is the largest single donor to the P.A. Contributions via the E.U.’s PEGASE funding instrument directly pay the salaries of P.A. education sector civil servants, including those of the “Palestinian Curriculum Development Center,” who draft, implement and teach the curriculum, IMPACT-se noted.
(PEGASE is a French acronym for Mechanism “Palestino-Europeen de Gestion et d’Aide Socio-Economique,” or Palestinian-European Management and Socio-Economic Aid.)
The amount totals €220 million ($240 million) a year.
Other contributors to P.A. education include a basket of funds known as the Joint Financing Arrangement, under which Germany, Norway, Finland and Ireland bilaterally finance the P.A.’s Ministry of Education, IMPACT-se said.
Among many examples taken from open-source material representing just a sample of activity at P.A. schools in Judea and Samaria is the Ya’bad Secondary Boys School, where parents were informed that the school would be closed on Oct. 18 “out of respect for the pure blood of our martyrs and to denounce the massacres made by the cowardly Nazi Occupation.”
The letter from school officials signed off: “There is no might and no power except by Allah. God punish the Jews and those who support them.”
At the Fadwa Touqan Mixed Elementary School in Nablus (biblical Shechem), second-grade pupils colored in drawings made by their art teacher, depicting Hamas terrorists on gliders (motorized gliders were used by Hamas on Oct. 7, becoming a massacre motif).
The drawings also include the words, “Glorious Gaza.” The school posted the pictures on its Facebook page.
Typical of P.A. schools, a celebratory rally was held to mark Oct. 7 at the Azzun Elementary School for Boys in Qalqilya.
Fourth-grade school students stood together to sing the words to the song “Our Al-Aqsa.” Lyrics include “place a dagger on your waist,” “water us with martyrdom,” and “Jerusalem is ours, the land is ours.” The song also declares that “the Jew desecrated Jerusalem, acted unjustly and tyrannically.”
At the same school, fourth-graders performed a class play in solidarity with Gaza in which children played out graphic scenes, some lying on the floor representing corpses and others drenched in red paint representing blood.
Students at the Rafedeen Mixed Elementary School in the South Hebron Hills also participated in a school rally in honor of the Hamas massacre.
A video on the school’s Facebook page shows a fourth-grade pupil reciting a poem urging that the Palestinian flag “be hoisted even by force, be hoisted even by blood.” The poem concludes with a call to Palestinians: “We shall water Al-Quds [Jerusalem] with blood. Palestine is ours, ours, ours.”
In one textbook from the P.A. curriculum, an eighth-grade Arabic reading comprehension is taught through a violent story promoting bombings in which Palestinians “cut the necks of enemy soldiers” and “wore explosive belts.” An accompanying illustration depicts Israeli soldiers shot dead by a Palestinian.
Meanwhile, a fifth-grade study card tells children they are duty-bound to “committing jihad and dying as a martyr” for the sake of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, or Temple Mount.
A reading comprehension for fifth-graders glorifies as a hero Dalal Mughrabi, who participated in the murder of 13 Israeli children and 25 civilian adults on a bus in the 1978 Coastal Road massacre. Math is taught to fourth-graders by asking them to add the numbers of “martyrs” from the First and Second Intifadas.
Earlier this month, IMPACT-se published a related study that found teachers and staff employed by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which teaches the P.A. curriculum in its schools, publicly supported the Oct. 7 attacks.
