By: Fern Sidman

When Congress required the U.S. State Department to provide regular, detailed updates about efforts to reform Palestinian school curricula, lawmakers believed they were erecting a firewall between American taxpayer dollars and the indoctrination of children with material that glorifies violence. But according to a newly released report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), that firewall was riddled with gaps—omissions, missed deadlines, and, in some cases, information so imprecise it verged on misleading.

As The Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) reported on Thursday, the findings raise profound questions about oversight, transparency, and the integrity of a process that was meant to assure Congress that U.S. aid to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) would not underwrite extremist ideology.

Under conditions attached to American funding for UNRWA, Congress required the State Department to submit reports detailing the agency’s educational activities, particularly any steps taken to reform Palestinian Authority textbooks used in UNRWA schools in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Israel and a constellation of watchdog groups have long warned that these materials promote intolerance and, in some cases, incite violence.

Yet the GAO found that from 2018 through 2024—the years in which the United States intermittently funded UNRWA—the department failed to meet its statutory obligations in all but one report. According to the JNS report, the watchdog concluded that the State Department either omitted required information, missed reporting deadlines, or submitted data that was simply inaccurate.

“In June 2019, we reported that UNRWA and the Department of State had taken actions to address potentially problematic content in UNRWA schools in the West Bank and Gaza—content that promotes intolerance toward groups of people or incites violence—but that State’s reporting to Congress omitted required information and contained inaccurate information,” the GAO wrote.

The language is restrained, but the implications are not.

The GAO report, highlighted in the JNS report, describes a reporting regime disturbingly casual for a matter of such geopolitical and moral gravity. In several instances, the State Department cited UNRWA actions “without a date,” relied on “oral discussions without identifying a corroborating document,” or failed to cite education-related information at all.

In effect, Congress was being asked to take critical assertions on faith.

This pattern persisted even as UNRWA itself acknowledged that it continued to uncover hundreds of pages of material that conflicted with U.N. values. According to the GAO, UNRWA reviewed 13,149 textbook pages and identified problematic content on 507 of them—3.85% of the total reviewed. Of the 435 specific issues flagged, 349—roughly 80%—were deemed inconsistent with U.N. positions.

As the JNS report noted, these were not trivial editorial oversights. They included mathematics problems that use the number of “martyrs” to teach arithmetic and descriptions of children injured while participating in demonstrations against “Zionist prisons.”

Perhaps the most jarring example, cited by both the GAO and in the JNS report, concerns a fifth-grade Arabic textbook that featured a “controversial figure” so inflammatory that UNRWA ultimately banned the lesson altogether in January of last year.

While the GAO report did not name the individual, a June statement by UNRWA’s commissioner-general, Philippe Lazzarini, makes clear that the figure was Dalal Mughrabi—one of the perpetrators of the 1978 Coastal Road massacre in which 38 Israeli civilians, including 13 children, were murdered.

According to the GAO, UNRWA “stopped using a fifth-grade Arabic textbook, in which this figure appears and reported having banned the teaching related to the figure altogether, now relying on supplementary materials to teach the subject.”

UNRWA officials suggested the change was prompted by conflict in the West Bank and Gaza and the reliance on self-learning materials, but the necessity of banning the lesson at all underscores the magnitude of the problem.

The GAO report further describes how UNRWA teachers “often deviate” from approved curricula based on their students’ views about “problematic content.” One teacher admitted to difficulty teaching maps of Jerusalem because of differing beliefs about sovereignty.

“She explained that students often share their own feelings about the conflict, which can lead to emotional discussions and make it harder to stay focused on the lesson,” the report states.

As the JNS report emphasized, this admission demolishes the comforting fiction that extremist material can be surgically excised from textbooks while the classroom environment itself remains neutral. The ideology seeps in through lived experience, peer discourse, and instructors who, consciously or not, bend lessons toward prevailing sentiments.

The GAO findings come against the backdrop of a decade-long tug-of-war over UNRWA funding. The United States cut off support in 2019 and 2020 during the first Trump administration. Funding was restored under President Biden, only to be severed again in 2024 as part of a congressional deal—this time driven largely by concerns about UNRWA’s educational programs and Israeli allegations that the agency employed hundreds of Hamas members in Gaza.

As JNS has documented, these funding decisions were predicated on the belief that rigorous oversight would ensure reforms. The GAO report now suggests that Congress may have been operating on a dangerously incomplete picture.

Despite the gravity of its findings, the GAO report makes no recommendations for improving State Department reporting—citing the current U.S. halt in funding to UNRWA. But that silence is itself a kind of indictment.

“The absence of recommendations does not reflect satisfaction,” one congressional aide told JNS on background. “It reflects the reality that the system broke down while money was still flowing.”

The watchdog’s restraint leaves lawmakers with a dilemma: how to restore accountability in a funding environment that has become politically radioactive.

For critics, the story is not merely about bureaucratic missteps. It is about a pattern of neglect that allowed assurances to replace evidence, and optimism to substitute for verification.

As JNS has repeatedly noted, the GAO report corroborates what Israeli officials and independent monitors have warned for years: that Palestinian textbooks used in UNRWA schools are not merely outdated or insensitive, but structurally infused with narratives that normalize violence and delegitimize Israel’s existence.

And while UNRWA has taken steps to review and amend materials, the persistence of hundreds of problematic pages—even after years of scrutiny—suggests that the problem is not marginal.

Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of the GAO report is not what it reveals, but what it implies: that Congress may have continued to appropriate funds without a clear understanding of how those dollars intersected with the realities of classroom instruction in conflict zones.

The State Department’s reports, the GAO says, were riddled with missing citations, uncorroborated claims, and incomplete data. For lawmakers charged with stewarding U.S. foreign aid, this amounted to legislating in the dark.

With U.S. funding to UNRWA once again suspended, the immediate financial stakes may appear diminished. But the policy ramifications are anything but resolved. Should funding resume, Congress will confront a stark choice: either insist on a radically more transparent reporting framework, or risk repeating the same cycle of assurance and omission.

As the JNS report framed it, the GAO report is less a postmortem than a warning flare—a signal that without rigorous oversight, well-intentioned aid can drift into moral ambiguity, and that the cost of that drift is paid not only in dollars, but in the minds of children taught from pages that blur the line between education and incitement.

The lessons of omission, it seems, are now unavoidable.