IMPACT-se Report: Review of the 2025-2026 Palestinian Authority School Curriculum

The 2025–26 IMPACT-se review finds the Palestinian Authority curriculum remains unreformed and continues to promote anti-Semitism, glorify terrorism and martyrdom, erase Israel from maps, politicize academic subjects with violent themes, and reject coexistence. Despite EU–PA commitments, early-grade and Grade 12 textbooks are unchanged, and even new wartime Gaza materials replicate incitement. Teacher guides deepen hostility, showing that without enforceable oversight, the curriculum remains a driver of radicalization rather than peace.

The following is an executive summary of the report. For the full report, click here.

The 2025–2026 Palestinian Authority (PA) national curriculum, taught to more than 1.3 million students across the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, including UNRWA schools, remains fundamentally unchanged since the 2016 reform cycle and continues to violate UNESCO standards on peace and tolerance systematically. IMPACT-se’s comprehensive review of 290 textbooks and 71 teacher guides confirms that the curriculum incites anti-Semitism, glorifies violence, promotes jihad and martyrdom, erases Israel from maps and texts, distorts history, and rejects peace or coexistence in any form. Despite repeated commitments by the PA and the European Union that Grades 1–4 and 12 were undergoing reform and would be aligned with UNESCO benchmarks by 2024–2025, no verified reforms have been implemented. Shortened or abridged versions of several Grade 12 books merely condense content and retain all problematic material. Early-grade books likewise remain unchanged, continuing to introduce vocabulary of martyrdom as early as Grade 1.

The curriculum embeds virulent anti-Semitism by portraying Jews collectively as deceitful, manipulative, corrupt, or divinely cursed. At the same time, modern political material accuses Jews and Zionists of global conspiracies, fabricated religious claims, and inherent hostility to Islam. Dehumanization of Israelis is pervasive: textbooks describe Israelis as demonic murderers, compare them to serpents and Satan’s aides, and include graphic imagery of violence against civilians. Violent jihad is presented as a religious duty and the pinnacle of faith, directly tied to “liberating Palestine,” while martyrdom is romanticized with promises of divine reward. Terrorist attacks, including the Coastal Road massacre in 1978 and Munich in 1972, are glorified as heroic national achievements.

Even science and math textbooks are politicized, using slingshots to teach Newton’s Law, counting “martyrs” in calculus problems, teaching chemistry through prison hunger strikes, and illustrating biology lessons with images of children shot in conflict. Across subjects, Israel is erased: maps show “Palestine” from the river to the sea; Israeli cities such as Tel Aviv and Haifa are omitted; and all references to Israel are replaced with “the Zionist entity” or “occupation.” Gender materials promote systemic inequality, depicting women as inherently inferior and prescribing male guardianship.

Teacher guides, still in use from 2018–2019, reinforce and intensify hateful content, explicitly equating “Jew” and “Zionist,” describing anti-semitism as a Zionist invention, and teaching that Israeli Jews are “fated to disappear.” The period following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack intensified global scrutiny, leading to new EU–PA reform pledges; however, the PA continued to deny any curriculum changes and proceeded to release wartime abridged Gaza textbooks that reproduced incitement verbatim. EU funding has nonetheless continued, over €400 million since July 2024, despite unmet benchmarks, the absence of transparency tools, and no evidence of revised content.

Overall, the report concludes that the PA curriculum remains ideologically rigid, structurally resistant to reform, and a barrier to any future peace process, actively cultivating hostility, intolerance, and historical distortion. Without independent verification mechanisms, enforceable conditions on international funding, and the removal of extremist content, the curriculum will continue to function as a driver of radicalization rather than a pathway to coexistence.

Source: “Review of the 2025-2026 Palestinian Authority School Curriculum,” IMPACT-se, (November 19, 2025).