Story By: Alex Cope, Sub Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Newsflash

School textbooks which use numbers of martyrs to teach arithmetic and attacks on IDF soldiers to teach physics are reportedly being used to teach Palestinian children in online classes during the COVID lockdown.

The textbooks were reportedly found to be in use in online classes run by the Palestinian Authority. during the coronavirus lockdown by IMPACT, an organisation for research, policy and advocacy which analyses and monitors education.

Marcus Sheff, CEO of IMPACT said: “Even when studying at home, Palestinian children cannot escape the hate. The violence and incitement of the official Palestinian curriculum is being neatly migrated online by official and unofficial educational initiatives and fed into their living rooms.

“If anything, the online versions make the hate even more graphic and awful than before. If the donor community thought this global pandemic would lead to the Palestinian Ministry of Education leaving the hate behind, they were wrong.”

A reading exercise for 10-year-olds in books includes a passage glorifying Dalal al-Mughrabi who carried out the 1978 Coastal Road Massacre which killed 38 Israeli civilians.

And IMPACT reports that Nasser Al-Rajabi, who teaches Arabic at the Wasyah Al-Rasoul Elementary School for boys in Hebron posted a YouTube video with graphic images to illustrate the passage.

Text taken from the textbook reportedly used in the video reads: “She took out of her bag the flag of Palestine, kissed it and then hung it inside the bus” after opening fire inside the vehicle.

IMPACT report the teacher asked students “the Palestinian woman has a role in resisting the Occupier. How is this manifested in the text?” He then reportedly replied in the video: “This is manifested in the image of sacrifice that Dalal al-Mughtabi presented as one of the women of Palestine, who waged Jihad against the Israeli Occupation.”

Newton’s Second Law is taught through an image of a boy in a headscarf firing a slingshot at soldiers while the word ‘martyr’ appears in a reading exercise for four-year-olds. Another image used to teach social studies and Islamic education shows an excavator bearing the Star of David digging under a mosque which is about to land on top of it.

The Georg Eckert Institute is now reviewing the material.

IMPACT CEO Sheff said: “We very much hope the Georg Eckert Institute that is reviewing the Palestinian curriculum for the European Union, British and German governments are paying attention to this,” Sheff said. “It is clear that teaching Jihad is too important to the Palestinian Authority to be stopped by anything as mundane as a global pandemic.

“This is what happens when the Palestinian Authority makes a strategic decision to encourage over a million Palestinian children to sacrifice themselves and when the international community funds it”.

The Daily Mail recently reported that British aid money had been used to fund the schools where similar books were used via the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.

The report says that the UK has given 330 million GBP to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the past five years and pledged another 65 million GBP for this year.

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