Amidst demands for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to eliminate content inciting terrorism from its educational materials, Francesca Albanese, the UN's former- Special Rapporteur for Palestinian territories, known for her pro-Hamas sentiments, has sparked controversy by accusing detractors of attempting to "manipulate curricula to obscure Palestinian culture and history."
The UNRWA is among the primary bodies in Gaza responsible for providing education, health care, and social services to the territory’s Palestinian population, and it administers about half the schools in the Gaza Strip.
The agency has become a charged topic since the outbreak of Israel’s ongoing war with Gaza, as Israel and Western democracies attempt to negotiate the tension between meeting the needs of Palestinian civilians and depriving Hamas of resources to use in attacks against Israelis. On October 16, there were reports, including from UNRWA's X (formerly Twitter) account, that "a group of people with trucks" had broken into an agency facility and stolen resources. The agency later retracted this account.
After UNRWA was pressured to remove some incitement to terrorism in their schools' textbooks, the UN's pro-Hamas Palestine Rapporteur @FranceskAlbs complains that “curricula is manipulated to obscure Palestinian culture and history.” pic.twitter.com/ESlxInIT2f
— UN Watch (@UNWatch) October 26, 2023
Complaints against UNRWA education system in Gaza
According to a report by UN Watch and IMPACT-SE in March, the UN agency continues to employ teachers who spread hate and teach hateful and inciting content to children, even after repeated reports warning of the antisemitism in their schools.
The report included 100 pages of evidence showing examples of hate and incitement to violence spread by UNRWA teachers and schools.
The organizations compiled the evidence by searching through the Facebook profiles of confirmed UNRWA employees and collected photos from inside UNRWA classrooms and UNRWA-created material distributed online.
In July 2022, IMPACT-SE published an analysis which showed Palestinians textbooks produced by the UNRWA containing antisemitic, hateful, and violent passages.
Some of the antisemitic passages included labeling Jews as inherently treacherous in an Islamic education drill. In a grammar exercise, Jews are implied to be impure and that they defile al-Aqsa Mosque.