A Palestinian geography teacher who spent 15 years in United Nations schools in Gaza says a colleague’s classroom rhetoric about Jews and Israelis prompted her to speak up — and that speaking up nearly cost her her tongue.
The 40-year-old educator, whose identity was withheld, told the New York Post in an interview published Monday that she objected after a fellow teacher made statements to students encouraging hatred of Jews and violence against Israelis. Days later, she says, a school administrator confronted her with a pair of scissors and threatened her for raising the objection. The alleged threat was that her tongue would be cut out.
Fearing retaliation against her family, she stayed quiet at first, according to the account. She has since gone public with a warning: that Gaza’s schools are on track to produce another generation of extremists.
Why she stayed, and why she left
The teacher said she had deliberately chosen her employer, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East — UNRWA — because she believed the U.N. would give Gaza’s children an education insulated from Hamas’s influence. That belief, she now says, did not survive contact with reality. Instead of a curriculum kept clear of politics, she describes teachers promoting extremist ideas and treating violence as something to celebrate.
Her allegations have not been independently verified, and they rest on a single unnamed source. That is a real limitation, and readers should weigh it accordingly. But the broader question she raises — what is actually taught inside UNRWA classrooms — is not a new one, and it is not one the agency has answered to universal satisfaction.
The agency’s record under scrutiny
UNRWA has fielded accusations about its neutrality before, and the most serious did not come from critics but from the United Nations itself. After the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, the U.N. investigated allegations that 19 UNRWA employees had taken part. In August 2024, U.N. investigators said the evidence indicated nine of those employees may have been involved; they were fired. The episode forced the agency to defend its vetting and oversight at the highest level.
The agency’s official position is firm: it does not teach hatred in its schools and it has zero tolerance for incitement to violence. If the Gaza teacher’s account is accurate, her experience suggests a gap between policy on paper and what happens in rooms where no one from headquarters is watching — and between a formal zero-tolerance standard and the courage required of a single employee to invoke it.
She says the threat came not from a colleague in the hallway but from the administrative layer tasked with running the school. That detail, if borne out, is the thorniest part of her story. A rule against indoctrination only means something if the people who enforce school discipline are willing to apply it to the employees who violate it.
The stakes as Gaza rebuilds
The timing is not incidental. Gaza’s education system has been devastated by years of war, and reconstruction now presents an enormous logistical and moral challenge. Rebuilding classrooms is the straightforward part. Deciding what gets taught in them — and who is allowed to object when the wrong thing is taught — is harder, and the teacher’s account suggests the second problem may be the one nobody wants to confront.
Teaching children to hate another people would compound an already staggering tragedy, turning reconstruction into a project of passing grievance from one generation to the next. The international bodies overseeing Gaza’s schools have an obligation to protect students from indoctrination, and the teacher’s allegations, unverified as they are, put that obligation squarely back in the spotlight.
What happens next matters. If the allegations are dismissed without investigation, other teachers who see the same thing will draw an obvious conclusion about whether speaking up is worth the risk. If they are examined seriously, the results will either vindicate UNRWA’s stated policies or reveal how far practice has drifted from them.
For now, the only person on the record is a teacher who says she tried to do her job the way she thought the U.N. wanted it done — and was met with scissors rather than a hearing. Her account revives questions about extremism in Palestinian classrooms and about whether the agency responsible for those classrooms can police itself. Those questions were already there before she spoke. She has simply made them harder to ignore.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/gaza-teacher-says-she-was-threatened-for-opposing-hatred-of-jews-in-classroom/