Watchdog: PA Schools Glorified Oct 7 Massacre in Lessons

Palestinian schools run by the Palestinian Authority marked the anniversary of Hamas's October 7 massacre with classroom activities that celebrated the attack rather than mourned its victims, according to a new report from the watchdog group Palestinian Media Watch.

The organization, which has spent decades tracking incitement in Palestinian textbooks, television and official media, said PA schools held assemblies praising the October 7 assault — in which Hamas-led terrorists killed roughly 1,200 people in southern Israel and dragged hundreds more into Gaza as hostages — as a "morning of victory." According to Palestinian Media Watch, the phrase was used in student gatherings to frame the deadliest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust as a heroic triumph rather than a war crime.

Even more disturbing, the watchdog reported, were classroom materials allegedly distributed to third-graders that turned the atrocity into an arithmetic exercise — asking young children to calculate the number of Israelis killed and the number of Hamas gunmen who breached the border that day. Palestinian Media Watch says such lessons are not isolated incidents but part of a broader pattern in which the PA's official curriculum embeds numbers, dates and imagery from terrorist attacks into ordinary schoolwork, a technique the group has documented for years in its reviews of PA-approved textbooks.

Palestinian Media Watch, founded to monitor Palestinian education and state media for antisemitic and pro-terror content, argues the findings show the PA is actively indoctrinating a new generation of Palestinian children to view violence against Jews and Israelis as something to be celebrated rather than condemned. The group has previously flagged PA textbooks for lionizing suicide bombers, erasing Israel from maps, and reinforcing themes of "martyrdom," and it says this latest material fits squarely within that record.

The report lands amid renewed scrutiny of how Western governments fund Palestinian education. The United States, European Union and other international donors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars annually into programs tied to the Palestinian Authority and to UNRWA, the UN agency that also runs schools in Gaza and the West Bank. Critics of that funding arrangement have long argued that oversight is inadequate and that donor money effectively subsidizes incitement, a concern that intensified after October 7 exposed alleged links between UNRWA facilities and Hamas operations. BreakFirst has previously reported on calls from Israeli officials for the UN to lose US funding over the UNRWA probe, as well as on the evacuation of an UNRWA compound in Kafr Aqab that Israeli officials say was tied to militant activity.

Critics say the Palestinian Media Watch findings raise urgent questions about whether the PA — which Washington and other Western capitals have long treated as a potential partner for a future peace settlement — is instead cultivating hatred and preparing children for continued conflict rather than coexistence. Supporters of continued aid to Palestinian institutions have historically countered that curriculum reform takes time and that cutting off funding could harm ordinary families, an argument that watchdog groups like Palestinian Media Watch reject as insufficient given what they describe as decades of documented incitement.

It remains unclear whether the PA Ministry of Education will respond directly to the specific claims in the Palestinian Media Watch report, and the Authority has in the past disputed similar accusations from the group, arguing its curriculum has been revised under international pressure. What is clear is that the report will likely fuel fresh debate in Washington and European capitals over conditioning or reducing aid to Palestinian educational institutions, an issue that has surfaced repeatedly in congressional hearings on foreign assistance since October 7, 2023. For now, Palestinian Media Watch says it will continue monitoring PA classrooms and textbooks as the anniversary season of the attack draws renewed attention to how the next generation of Palestinians is being taught to remember it.