Supporters and gunmen from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine participate in a symbolic funeral of a militant Tamer al-Kilani, who was killed in an explosion in the West Bank, on Oct. 23, 2022, in Gaza city. Photo: Ramez Habboub/Pacific Press/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has failed to enact the educational reforms it promised European lawmakers in 2024 after revelations that its Palestinian teachers had been teaching students to hate Jews, oppose peace with Israel, and commit jihadist terrorism, according to a new report by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (Impact-SE).

As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the European Parliament (EP) has continuously implored UNRWA to stop making antisemites and suicide bombers out of students with educational materials that experts have described as among the most antisemitic and inciting of violence in the world. From math to theology, to literature and science, their content promotes blistering hatred for Jews and Israel, indoctrinating students as young as six to commit their lives to “martyrdom” and inter-generational war. Compromise with Israelis is described as betraying Palestinian identity, suicide bombings as intrinsic to it and a prerequisite for entry into heaven.

In April 2024, the EU-commissioned “Colonna report” — named for former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, who led an independent review of UNRWA’s neutrality — recommended that agency officials shape up or risk losing the bloc’s funding. UNRWA responded by generating a “High-Level Action Plan,” of which it completed two objectives and left 17 incomplete in the plan’s first phase.

More were left undone year to year, leaving the schools as radioactive as they were two years ago. Today, Grade Nine students reading the agency’s Islamic Education textbook learn the importance of killing non-Muslims as an act of jihad and that dying in combat against a non-Muslim secures one’s ticket to the afterlife. Jihad offers opportunities for women too, Islamic Education for Grade Five tells girl students, imploring them, according to an Impact-SE translation, to “kill, be killed, and send their children to die.”

“The international community committed itself to ensuring that the failures identified by the Colonna Report would be addressed through meaningful institutional reform,” Impact-SE CEO Marcus Sheff said in a statement announcing the findings. “Two years later, our analysis demonstrates that UNRWA has chosen token compliance instead of delivering the substantive changes the review demanded.”

He added that with many governments still funding the agency on the assumption that the Colonna recommendations have been implemented, the gap between UNRWA’s claims and its actual, verifiable reform “should be a red flag to every donor.”

Impact-SE has been a leading critic of the role Palestinian curricula plays in stoking the embers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and fostering religious extremism. In March 2024, the organization unveiled transcriptions of recordings confirming the roles of Yusef Zidan Sliman Al-Hawajri and Mamdouh Hussein Ahmad Al-Qek — both of whom were hired as educators by the agency — in the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas-led terrorist attacks on Israel, citing them as evidence that UNRWA has violated its mandate. Months later, in September 2024, UNRWA admitted that the top Hamas commander in Lebanon, whom the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had just killed in an airstrike, had been employed as one of its teachers.

Sheff told the US House Foreign Affairs Committee that year that UNRWA’s problem was not “a few bad apples” but rather a rotten institutional culture, pointing to textbooks that describe Jews as “liars and fraudsters” whose corruption “will lead to their annihilation.” He said students are taught lessons celebrating the mass killing of Jews.

In a separate report, Impact-SE found that Palestinian Authority textbooks teach girls that women are inferior to men.

“The characterization of women as inferior in Palestinian Authority textbooks reflects a broader and worrying narrative of bigotry in the curriculum,” Sheff said, adding that it also contradicts international gender-equality treaties the PA has ratified. He said the textbooks’ framing of women’s participation in “resistance activities” as a form of gender equality “sets a disturbing precedent.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.