NGO Monitor reports, translated Palestinian Authority curricula, and UNRWA budget records reveal a direct pipeline from Western taxpayer dollars to educational materials that promoted violence and extremism in Gaza’s schools — years before the October 7 attacks exposed the consequences.
Image directive: Create a pie chart showing UNRWA’s 2023 donor breakdown: US and EU countries (~$865M / 75%), other donors. Or create a flow diagram showing Western taxpayer money → UNRWA → PA textbooks → Gaza classrooms. Search Unsplash for “empty classroom” or “school textbooks education.”
The Funding Pipeline
In 2023, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees — UNRWA — operated on total funding of approximately $1.47 billion. Of that amount, confirmed pledges from the United States and European Union member states accounted for roughly $865 million — approximately 75% of the agency’s budget. The European Union alone contributed EUR 82 million. The U.S. provided $121 million in fiscal year 2024 funding.
Among UNRWA’s core functions is the operation of schools serving Palestinian refugee children in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. These schools use textbooks produced by the Palestinian Authority — and it is these textbooks that multiple independent investigations have found to contain material promoting violence, glorifying terrorism, and demonizing Israelis and Jews.
The Documented Evidence
The evidence was not hidden. NGO Monitor and IMPACT-se — the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education — published multiple reports throughout 2023 documenting problematic content in UNRWA-distributed educational materials.
In March 2023, UN Watch and IMPACT-se released a collaborative report titled “UNRWA Review of Teachers and Schools Concerning Incitement to Hate and Violence.” In November 2023, IMPACT-se published “UNRWA Education: Textbooks and Terror” — a comprehensive analysis of the agency’s educational materials and their relationship to extremist content.
The findings were explicit. Palestinian Authority textbooks used in UNRWA schools contained content that glorified armed struggle, presented violence against civilians as legitimate resistance, and used mathematical word problems and reading exercises to normalize conflict. Geography lessons omitted Israel from maps. History lessons presented a narrative in which violent resistance was not merely justified but heroic.
The Personnel Problem
The textbook issue was compounded by documented connections between UNRWA employees and terrorist organizations. NGO Monitor identified UNRWA school graduates and staff with links to armed groups, including individuals affiliated with Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades. One documented case involved Rami Abd al-Rahman Abu Muhaysin — a graduate of UNRWA Al-Bureij Elementary and Preparatory Schools who became a member of the Al-Qassam Brigades, participated in bomb and rocket attacks, and committed a terror attack in 2004 in Kfar Darom, Gaza.
The agency’s Curriculum Framework — which includes tools designed to guide review and enrichment of host country curricula — was supposed to identify and address problematic educational materials. But the framework’s existence as a policy document had little observable impact on the actual content being taught in classrooms.
The Donor Response
Western donor nations were aware of the textbook problems. Reports from NGO Monitor and IMPACT-se were widely circulated among donor governments. The U.S. State Department was required to report to Congress on UNRWA’s efforts to address problematic content. A later GAO report — “WEST BANK AND GAZA: State’s Reporting on UN Efforts to Address Problematic Textbook Content Had Gaps Before Funding Ended” — documented that the State Department’s own reporting on the issue contained significant gaps.
Despite this knowledge, funding continued. The diplomatic calculus was straightforward: UNRWA provides essential services — food, healthcare, education — to millions of Palestinian refugees. Cutting funding would create a humanitarian crisis. So donor nations continued writing checks while filing diplomatic protests that produced no meaningful change in curriculum content.
After October 7
The October 7, 2023 attacks changed the equation. Most major donor countries suspended UNRWA funding, and subsequent investigations revealed that some UNRWA employees had direct involvement in the attacks. But the textbook problem predated October 7 by years — arguably by decades. The educational infrastructure that normalized violence was not a post-October 7 discovery. It was a pre-October 7 failure of donor oversight.
The question that Western taxpayers should be asking is not whether their money funded problematic textbooks — the evidence is unambiguous that it did. The question is why their governments continued funding an educational system they knew was teaching extremism, and what accountability mechanisms exist to prevent it from happening again.
Eduardo Bacci is an investigative journalist at The Investigative Journal. Data sources include UNRWA budget documents, NGO Monitor reports, IMPACT-se educational analyses, GAO reports, and Congressional oversight records.