What the Record Shows About Textbooks Used in Gaza Schools

The first thing to say clearly is that this debate is often framed too loosely. Gaza’s formal schoolbooks were not simply “Hamas textbooks.” In practice, the core curriculum used in Gaza schools came largely from the Palestinian Authority, and UNRWA schools used that same host-government curriculum. So the real question is not whether every teacher or student is ideologically identical. It is what the approved textbooks and accompanying educational materials actually contain.

On that narrower question, the record is strong enough to sustain concern. It is not strong enough to justify lazy slogans about every classroom or every child.

Which curriculum is at issue

UNRWA does not write a separate national curriculum for Gaza. Its schools use host-country textbooks and then review those materials against U.N. neutrality rules. In Gaza and the West Bank, that has meant Palestinian Authority textbooks. UNRWA’s digital learning platform says as much directly.¹

That means two separate issues have to be kept distinct:

1. what the Palestinian Authority curriculum says; and
2. what UNRWA does when that curriculum contains material at odds with U.N. neutrality standards.

What independent reviews found

The most important non-advocacy review is the 2021 EU-commissioned study by the Georg Eckert Institute, a German academic institute specializing in textbook research. The study did not describe the curriculum as uniformly hateful or devoid of ordinary educational content. But it did help establish the central point that this was not a manufactured controversy: even a cautious academic review found serious recurring problems in the material under review.²

The more recent U.N.-commissioned Colonna review, published in April 2024, was broadly protective of UNRWA as an institution while still acknowledging that host-country textbooks with problematic content were being used in some UNRWA schools. The review said a recent UNRWA rapid review of Palestinian Authority textbooks found 3.85% of textbook pages contained issues of concern to U.N. values, guidance, or position on the conflict. It listed recurring problems such as maps that erase Israel in non-historical contexts, describing Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, naming cities inside Israel as Palestinian cities, and use of the phrase “Zionist occupation” for Israel.³⁴

That is important because it moves the argument beyond dueling advocacy reports. Even the U.N.-backed neutrality review accepted that the curriculum problem was real, even if it described it as limited rather than total.

What U.S. oversight found

The U.S. Government Accountability Office added a second institutional layer in 2026. Its report on West Bank and Gaza educational assistance found that UNRWA and the U.S. State Department had mechanisms to identify and address potentially problematic educational materials, but that State’s reporting to Congress had important gaps before funding ended. In other words, the U.S. oversight problem was not that nobody had ever noticed questionable content. It was that monitoring and reporting were incomplete and uneven.⁵

That finding does not by itself prove the curriculum is irredeemable. It does show that donor governments had reason to keep pressing for better review, better documentation, and clearer reform benchmarks.

What can be said carefully

The most defensible formulation is this:

• textbooks used in Gaza schools have included recurring anti-Israel and, at points, antisemitic content;
• maps and place-naming often erase Israel or replace it with an undifferentiated “Palestine”;
• some materials frame violent “resistance” in ways that donors and neutrality reviewers have repeatedly treated as unacceptable; and
• UNRWA’s own safeguards have not fully solved the problem.

What should not be claimed from the available evidence is that every page teaches hatred, that every child absorbs the message in the same way, or that curriculum alone explains later support for violence. Schools matter, but so do family, media, political leadership, and the lived experience of war and repression. Curriculum is one part of a wider political culture, not a complete explanation for it.

Why donors keep returning to this issue

The reason this question keeps resurfacing in Brussels and Washington is simple: curriculum is one of the few parts of the conflict environment that donors can realistically pressure institutions to change. That is why the European Commission’s July 2024 Letter of Intent with the Palestinian Authority included an education-reform track, and why later Commission answers continued to describe textbook revision as part of the agreed reform agenda.⁶⁷

You do not have to believe curriculum explains everything to believe it matters. Official textbooks are an institutional choice. If donors are paying for education, asking what the books say is not extremism. It is basic due diligence.

Bottom line

The strongest case is not “all Gazan schools teach hate.” The strongest case is that the Palestinian Authority curriculum used in Gaza, including in UNRWA schools, has repeatedly contained anti-Israel, antisemitic, and violence-normalizing material serious enough to trigger sustained concern from academic reviewers, U.N. neutrality reviewers, U.S. oversight bodies, and European funders. That is a real problem even when described carefully.

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