Despite having committed to reform its education system multiple times in recent years, the Palestinian Authority’s curriculum remains unchanged, IMPACT-se wrote in a report published on Wednesday.
For its survey of the PA’s 2025-2026 curriculum, the international research institute IMPACT-se (the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education) reviewed 290 textbooks and 71 teacher guides used across Gaza and the West Bank.
“The PA continues to erase Israel from maps and texts, embeds antisemitic motifs, glorifies violence and martyrdom, and politicizes STEM and grammar exercises in ways that normalize conflict,” IMPACT-se found.
With the US-backed Gaza plan now adopted by the United Nations Security Council, the NGO noted that these findings are directly relevant to “day after” education decisions.
“The current PA curriculum is entirely unfit for Palestinian schools. An alternative one must be implemented in Gaza, if a more peaceful and tolerant future is to become a reality,” IMPACT-se added.
Above all, the research institute found that antisemitism remains a central feature of the curriculum, and violence and terrorism are openly glorified.
The unchanged PA course of studies fails to meet US demands. It violates a July 2024 agreement with the European Union to fully align textbooks for Grades 1-4 and Grade 12 with United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) standards on peace and tolerance by September 2025.
The EU-PA agreement made future EU funding contingent on PA reform in key areas, including the education curriculum. Yet, the EU has already disbursed over €500 million to the PA since July 2024.
“This comprehensive report exposes a stark and disturbing reality: Virulent antisemitism, the glorification of jihad, and incitement to violence remain deeply embedded across all grades of Palestinian Authority textbooks,” said IMPACT-se CEO Marcus Sheff.
He noted that Palestinian Authority textbooks had conditioned the thousands of Hamas-led Gazans who carried out the massacres of October 7, most of whom had previously attended UNRWA schools.
“The obvious conclusion of this report is the long-overdue, deep, and sustained intervention by the international community... [as] systematic indoctrination of Palestinians via extremist education is here to stay,” he added.
“There is no halt in sight to what is clearly a strategy of indoctrination through extremist education. The curriculum being taught today is a blueprint for future violence and terror.”
Key findings from IMPACT-se
The PA curriculum continues to put antisemitism at its core, with textbooks portraying Jews in dehumanizing and demonic terms, IMPACT-se found.
A Grade 7 teacher’s guide, for instance, depicted Israelis “bashing children’s heads in front of their mothers” and mutilating women for jewelry, while textbooks depict Jewish plots to overthrow al-Aqsa Mosque.
In addition, Israel is compared to serpents, vipers, and Satan’s aids, creating a demonic imagery of Jews.
The curriculum also erases Israel’s existence and denies Jewish history. According to IMPACT-se, all maps now depict “Palestine” from the river to the sea, omitting Israel entirely; cities like Tel Aviv and Haifa have been completely wiped out.
Another disturbing aspect is that the PA curriculum continues to glorify violence as a religious and national duty.
For example, violent jihad is described as the “peak of Islam,” and the path to glory, heaven, and divine reward.
A Grade 5 textbook teaches reading comprehension by praising Dalal al-Mughrabi, who led the 1978 massacre of 38 Israelis, including 13 children. It describes her “heroism” and how the massacre made her memory “immortal” in the “hearts and minds” of Palestinians.
In a Grade 8 Arabic language textbook, 14-year-old Palestinian children are taught reading comprehension, grammar, and vocabulary through a text that venerates suicide bombers wearing “explosive belts,” praises Palestinians’ daggers slashing Israelis’ throats, and explicitly calls students “to not forget” the image of burned Israelis [alluding to October 7.)
Such extremism is even seen in science and math. Case in point, a Grade 3 math textbook teaches numerical digits through numbers of Palestinian martyrs, and a physics lesson uses the image of a young girl firing a slingshot to teach Newton’s Law.
IMPACT-se’s findings are notable, given the importance of deradicalization to much of the future planning for a Palestinian state, something which many argue begins with education.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas announced on Saturday that he will send a high-level Palestinian delegation to UNESCO to review the Palestinian education curricula.
The aim is to consult UNESCO to align the Palestinian curriculum with the international standards it has adopted while still “preserving the essence of Palestinian national consciousness.”
However, Sheff told The Jerusalem Post that the PA has made formal commitments or entered into collaborative arrangements to reform its curriculum more than 20 times since 2018.
“We are now in 2025, and as the PA’s approach to UNESCO clearly demonstrates, none of these reforms took place,” he said.
“Interestingly, and during the same period, the PA repeatedly and explicitly stated in Arabic, on multiple occasions, that it has no intention of implementing any reforms whatsoever.”