Students at a school in East Jerusalem run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) were recorded in a recently resurfaced video explaining how they’ve been taught to murder Jews and take part in the generational struggle to reclaim land which they believe belongs to Palestinians.
The documentary was shot in 2022 in a school in the Shuafat refugee camp in East Jerusalem and recently resurfaced amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. In the video, students who appear to be as young as seven or eight years old tell an interviewer “we have been taught that the Jews kill our children.”
“Stabbing and trampling Jews brings respect to the Palestinians,” says another child. Another student explains that she is “ready to carry out a suicide attack.”
UNRWA schools “teach hatred of Jews and incite against the State of Israel,” the deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Ifat Ovadia-Luski said after the video resurfaced, according to YNetNews.
“The textbooks of UNRWA students in the Shuafat refugee camp feature pictures of murderers who committed terrorist acts and killed many Israelis, as a sign of praise and as a role model,” Bedein told Ynet.
Earlier in the video, adults living in the Shuafat refugee camp explain that they will never leave the camp because to do so would be to abandon their “right to return” to the formerly Arab villages their ancestors lived in generations ago.
The video comes after Israel identified at least 12 UNRWA staff members who participated in Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israel. One UNRWA worker joined the attack on kibbutz Be’eri, one participated in the Re’im attack where Hamas slaughtered hundreds of festival-goers, and another employee reportedly helped kidnap Israeli hostages. Israeli intelligence tied 1,200 of UNRWA’s 12,000 staffers in Gaza to either Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and has identified 190 UNRWA employees who are Hamas operatives.
Several countries have since cut off funding for UNRWA. The U.S. State Department temporarily halted funding for the United Nations agency pending an investigation and the U.S. has delivered more than $1 billion in the past three years in aid to UNRWA.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said this week that UNRWA schools teach “the doctrines of the extermination of Israel — the doctrines of terrorism, lauding terrorism, glorifying terrorism.”
The newly released video has contributed to growing calls in Israel to ensure that antisemitic instruction be rooted out of the education system. More than 15,000 students in the Arab education system in East Jerusalem are taught in unlicensed schools.
“The school operates without a license, in violation of the law. The enforcement division of the ministry has begun investigating the matter, and intends to involve investigative bodies and other authorities if necessary,” the Education Ministry said in a statement. “The ministry is working to strengthen the supervision of the education system in East Jerusalem, to reduce the number of students in recognized unofficial settings and to increase the number of students in formal education, according to the Israeli curriculum. In light of this policy, the proportion of students in schools that operate without a license in East Jerusalem has decreased from 58% in 1990 to only 13% at the end of 2022,” according to the ministry.”
Israel’s Education Committee also blasted the United Nations “for not doing anything against the Palestinian education industry that teaches jihad, the demonization of Jews and Israelis, and delegitimization of the State of Israel.”
UNRWA teachers cheered the rape and murder of Israeli civilians in a private group chat on October 7, according to documents exposed by U.N. Watch.