Palestinian textbooks for 2025-26 continue to erase Israel, incite antisemitism, promote martyrdom, violating EU agreement

Palestinian Authority (PA) textbooks for the 2025-25 school year remain unchanged from previous years, despite PA promises of reform. Antisemitism remains a central feature of the curriculum. Jews are depicted as deceitful, manipulative, or inherently corrupt enemies of Islam. Violence and terrorism are openly glorified, with terrorists who killed Israeli civilians lauded as martyrs and role models for youth. Israel is erased from maps and texts, its existence described as incompatible with justice while Israelis are routinely dehumanized as acting with demonic cruelty. Even science, mathematics and grammar exercises are designed to normalize violence and promote dehumanization.

The report reveals that despite commitments to textbook reform, the current PA curriculum remains unchanged and continues to systematically violate UNESCO-derived educational standards. In line with all previous editions since the 2020-21 school year, this year’s PA textbooks incite antisemitism and violence, promote jihad and martyrdom, glorify terrorism, reject peacemaking and the two-state solution, and erase Israel from maps. In July 2024, the PA signed an agreement with the European Union (EU) committing to a process of curriculum reform. The EU detailed that PA textbooks for Grades 1-4 were to be fully aligned with UNESCO standards of peace and tolerance by September 2025, and that PA textbooks for Grade 12 were to have undergone such reform by December 2024. IMPACT-se’s report demonstrates that the PA is violating this agreement.

Although a number of textbooks for these grades have been shortened for the 2025-26 school year, these represent formatting changes and no attempt to expunge problematic content. The EU-PA agreement specifically linked future EU funding to PA reform in key areas including the education curriculum. However, the EU has already disbursed over €500 million to the PA since July 2024. The agreement also pledged transparency over the reform program via the introduction of a Donor Platform, which has yet to be made public. Similarly, countries including the UK, Canada France, Australia formally recognized a Palestinian state in September.

The full report is available here.

This formal upgrade in bilateral relations also confers a responsibility on these countries to now hold the PA to international standards, including those in education. Today’s report highlights the importance of such accountability. Furthermore, as the future of education in Gaza comes into sharp focus as part of phase two of the Trump Plan, today’s report also serves as a timely, urgent reminder. The study underscores how the current PA curriculum is entirely unfit for Palestinian schools and that an alternative curriculum must be implemented in Gaza, if a more peaceful and tolerant future is to become reality.

IMPACT-se’s report analyzes 290 textbooks and 71 teacher guides from the Palestinian Authority’s 2025–2026 national school curriculum. The hard copies and digital versions of textbooks are used across schools in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, including UNRWA schools, and are taught to over 1.3 million students, spanning social and scientific subjects. IMPACT-se CEO, Marcus Sheff: “This comprehensive report exposes a stark and disturbing reality: virulent antisemitism, the glorification of jihad and incitement to violence remain deeply embedded across all grades of Palestinian Authority textbooks. To be clear: the Palestinian Authority signed a formal agreement with the European Union—its largest funder—to remove this hate-filled content, a demand also made by the United States, which has consequently sanctioned PA officials. Palestinian Authority textbooks conditioned the thousands of Hamas-led Gazans who carried out the vile massacres of October 7. The obvious conclusion of this report is that barring long-overdue, deep and sustained intervention by the international community, then systematic indoctrination of Palestinians via extremist education is here to stay. There is no halt in sight to what is clearly a strategy of indoctrination through extremist education. The curriculum being taught today is a blueprint for future violence and terror.”

Key findings include: Erasure of Israel and Jewish history: The curriculum continues to erase Israel’s existence and deny Jewish history. Peace content once included in earlier editions were removed several years ago, including mention of agreements such as the Annapolis and Camp David accords. Maps now depict “Palestine” from the river to the sea, omitting Israel entirely; cities like Tel Aviv and Haifa disappear, replaced with Mandatory Palestine borders and terminology such as “the Zionist entity.” Jewish history and heritage are similarly erased: the Western Wall is described not as Judaism’s holiest site, but as an “Islamic” location falsely claimed by Jews, and Jewish ties to Jerusalem are dismissed as “pretenses used by invaders.” Antisemitic motifs reinforce this narrative, including images showing a Star-of-David-marked arm gripping the globe and accusations of Jewish or “Zionist” control over global finance, media, and politics. Together, these elements form a curriculum that denies Israel’s reality, and erases Jewish presence from the land.

Antisemitism: The PA curriculum continues to embed antisemitism at its core, with textbooks portraying Jews collectively as deceitful and corrupt. Across grades, Israelis are presented in grotesquely dehumanizing and demonic terms, including a Grade 10 Arabic Language teacher guide depicting scenes of soldiers “laughing loudly” while massacring ten Palestinian villagers at a time, and ordering families to dig their own graves. A Grade 7 teacher guide describes Israelis ‘bashing children’s heads in front of their mothers’ and mutilating women for jewelry, while instructing students to visually re-create the event with drawings. These portrayals are reinforced by conspiracy theories taught as fact, such as Jewish plots for the collapse of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. In addition, Israel is compared to serpents, vipers and Satan’s aids, promoting demonic depictions of Jewish people as a collective. Teacher guides harden the message further, directing educators to teach that Israeli Jews are “fated to disappear.”

Grade 12 Islamic Education textbook printed for the 2025–2026 school year collectively depicting “the Jews” as immoral deceitful liars and manipulators who are hostile to Islam and Muslim Jihad and martyrdom: The PA curriculum continues to glorify violence as a religious and national duty. Violent jihad is described as the “peak of Islam,” and specified as “a “personal obligation” for every Muslim “for the liberation of Palestine”. Violent jihad is also portrayed as the path to glory, Heaven, and divine reward for those who sacrifice their lives fighting the “enemy”. Students are encouraged to research martyrdom’s “benefits,” such as a place in Paradise and seventy-two beautiful women.

Even Grade 1 children learn the word šahīd (martyr) as one of their first spelling terms. A Grade 5 textbook teaches reading comprehension by praising Dalal Al-Mughrabi, who led the 1978 massacre of 38 Israelis, including 13 children. It describes her “heroism” and how the massacre made her memory “immortal” in the “hearts and minds” of Palestinians. She is portrayed similarly at multiple points in the curriculum. A Grade 12 textbook includes a poem that urges students to “return” to Israeli cities “with a weapon in your hand,” using vivid, emotional verse to romanticize armed invasion in a way disturbingly reminiscent of the violence witnessed on 7 October 2023.

In a Grade 8 Arabic Language textbook,14-year-old Palestinian children are taught reading comprehension, grammar, and vocabulary through a grotesque text that lionizes suicide bombers wearing “explosive belts”, praises Palestinians’ daggers slashing Israelis’ throats, and explicitly calls students “to not forget” the image of burned Israelis—accompanied by a graphic illustration, cementing the glorification of violence. image.png Grade 8 Arabic Language textbook teaching reading comprehension, grammar, and vocabulary through a grotesque text that lionizes suicide bombers wearing ‘explosive belts’ praising Palestinians’ daggers slashing Israelis’ throats image.jpeg Image: Grade 5 Arabic Language textbook exalting terrorist Dalal Mughrabi.

Science and mathematics textbooks: Across subjects, including even science and math, violence is normalized, with physics lessons using the image of a young girl firing a slingshot to teach Newton’s Law, while a Grade 3 Math textbook teaches numerical digits through numbers of Palestinian “martyrs.” Lessons are politicized and routinely infused with imagery of conflict and promote dehumanization. In one example, a unit on liquid solutions in chemistry is taught through the use of chemical solutions by Palestinian prisoners during hunger strikes in Israeli prisons, reinforced by an emotive cartoon image. Biology lessons include a diagram for Grade 11 showing a 12-year-old boy shot during conflict, used to explain effects on the bladder and nervous system.

Science and mathematics textbooks can be expected to avoid themes of violent conflict, yet the PA curriculum consistently injects such issues into these subjects, using them as opportunities to normalize violence and negatively portray Israel. A close-up of a white background AI-generated content may be incorrect. Image: General Sciences Grade 10 textbook presenting a girl with a slingshot, strongly associated with Palestinian attacks on Israeli soldiers image.jpeg Gender: The PA curriculum also takes a problematic stance regarding women. Women are portrayed as inherently inferior to men—physically, mentally, and spiritually—and unfit for leadership or decision-making roles. Religious materials blame women for moral decline, discourage their participation in public life, and instructing that modest dress and obedience are necessary for their protection.

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