UNRWA: OBSTACLE
TO PEACE

UN Schools use Western taxpayers’ money to teach 

Palestinian children to hate Jews 

UN Watch and IMPACT-se
Joint Report Launch

This report is a joint publication by United Nations Watch and the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), an international research and policy institute that analyzes school curricula through UNESCO-defined standards of peace and tolerance. 

The report captures evidence taken from inside UNRWA classrooms, showing the teaching of these materials, and revealing how UNRWA’s own content directs students to study specific hateful passages in Palestinian textbooks — which the organization claims teachers are told to skip. The report identifies 133 UNRWA educators and staff who were found to promote hate and violence on social media, and an additional 82 UNRWA teachers and other staff affiliated with over 30 UNRWA schools involved in drafting, supervising, approving, printing, and distributing hateful content to students.

UNRWA in brief

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, commonly known as UNRWA, is a UN agency devoted exclusively to the provision of services to Palestinians displaced as a result of Israel’s 1948 War of Independence and their descendants. Although originally intended to be a temporary aid agency, its mandate has been repeatedly renewed. UNRWA’s main areas of operation include education, health care and social services. UNRWA is funded almost entirely by donations, mostly from governments, which account for over 92% of financial contributions to the Agency. 

Today, UNRWA provides benefits to approximately 5.9 million people designated as refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. According to UNRWA, the organization operates 702 schools with over 526,000 students and 19,877 educational staff, out of approximately 30,000 total staff.

One of UNRWA’s main stated objectives is to provide basic education to Palestinian youth, to enable them to obtain necessary skills and to impart key values such as dignity and tolerance. However, teachers and staff employed by UNRWA have systematically promoted terrorism and radical antisemitic ideology running counter to any prospect of peace.

We urge donor states to demand that UNRWA implement its stated “Zero Tolerance” policy for employees who incite racism or murder, by immediately terminating such employees. UNRWA must further conduct a thorough investigation into its facilities and put an immediate stop to all antisemitic and terrorist-inciting activities.


Perpetuating violence and
inciting hatred

UN Watch has published several reports exposing the systemic promotion of racial hatred and violence by UNRWA staff. Such practices constitute a gross breach of UNRWA employees’ neutrality obligations as enshrined in the UN Charter and in UN and UNRWA Staff Rules and Regulations. UN Watch has reported on several UNRWA employees celebrating terrorism, glorifying nazism and publicly calling for the extermination of Jews on Facebook.

Even more alarming than the Facebook posts themselves, however, is the fact that UNRWA systematically hires and employs racist staff and places the education of impressionable Palestinian youth in their hands.

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