Killers Are Made, Not Born

Historian Rafael Medoff examines how Palestinian children are indoctrinated to embrace violence against Jews.

Editor’s Note: Most of us know, to some degree, that Palestinian children are taught to hate Jews. But we don’t really grasp the extent of it—not until we see the specifics laid out, as historian Rafael Medoff does here in painful detail. It’s not easy to read, but it’s essential if we’re going to understand what we’re up against. This excerpt is from his new book, The Road to October 7: Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War Against the Jews (The Jewish Publication Society), which comes out October 1, 2025, and is available now for preorder. — Howard Lovy

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From their earliest years, children in the Palestinian Authority educational system use schoolbooks and participate in class activities that teach them to hate Israel, and to glorify terrorists who murder Jews.

At the Al-Tofula Kindergarten, in the PA town of Bayt Awwa, in 2023, students participated in a military drill, marching with toy guns, pretending to shoot Israelis, and holding a mock funeral procession with one kindergartner dressed as a “martyred” terrorist…. Kindergarteners in the PA town of Tubas who joined their school’s Girl Scout branch in 2022 were welcomed with a ceremony in which children held signs reading “We are all Ahmad Mansarah,” a reference to a young terrorist imprisoned for stabbing two Israelis.

Children from the Quarters of Jerusalem Kindergarten in the PA village of Hares held what organizers called “a solidarity rally with the heroic prisoners in the occupation prisons”— that is, terrorists jailed in Israel. Students at the Farah Kindergarten in Deir Ghassaneh also marched “in solidarity with the prisoners” jailed in Israel, clasping little homemade placards, as they were led by teachers and cheered on by adults in cartoon character costumes. “I am scared of the Jews” because “they kill worshippers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque” and “imprison small children,” a small girl declared at a rally of kindergarteners organized by the PA’s Red Crescent branch near Tulkarm and broadcast on PA Television.

Palestinian kindergarten graduation ceremonies likewise feature militaristic messages. The 2017 commencement at Islamic Jihad’s Al-Huda kindergarten in Gaza included a children’s skit in which uniformed jihadists members murder Israelis (depicted with stereotypical Orthodox Jewish garb) and abduct the corpses, as a song that begins “O I have prepared all sorts of rockets for my Zionist enemy that will reach where he lives” plays in the background. The 2011 graduation party at the “Bird of Paradise” kindergarten featured the children performing two plays in which they “depicted the reality of roadblocks, children, occupation soldiers, and the children’s death as Martyrs,” the official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida reported. Their “charming” acting “caused the audience to cry, as the children’s performance was accompanied by the playing of nationalistic songs.”

One Hamas recruitment video for its kindergartens shows a graduation ceremony in which schoolchildren donned Hamas headbands and, brandishing toy rifles and swords, marched in formation and jumped over obstacles while chanting, "Jihad! Allah Akbar! Your role model? The Prophet [Muhammad]. Your path? Jihad! Your aspiration? Death for Allah. Your movement? Hamas! Your movement? Hamas!”

In primary or elementary school, students in grades 1 through 4 are guided by textbooks steeped in anti-Israel and pro-violence messages. Our Beautiful Language, Vol.2 teaches first graders to identify words beginning with the letter “ya" by viewing images of a little girl playing the flute, a boy playing basketball, and—much larger than the rest—a uniformed man with a rifle and a huge PLO flag. A reading exercise explaining the letter “ha” highlights the words shahid (martyr) and hujum (attack).

National and Life Education, Vol.1 directs second graders to color a map showing all of Israel, labeled “Palestine,” with human figures comprising its borders, flanked by the caption, "We will draw the map of our country with our bodies.” Our Beautiful Language for second grade features a large illustration of children wearing the uniform of the terrorist Fatah group’s youth movement, next to a poem vowing to “carry the revolution’s flame” to Haifa and Jaffa, two cities within Israel’s pre-1967 borders, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Mathematics, Vol.1 teaches addition to third graders by having them count the number of “martyrs” —Arabs killed while murdering, or attempting to murder, Israelis, or during Israeli counter-operations— in the First and Second Intifadas and the 2014 Gaza War. Another exercise in the book has students count the number of “prisoners in the Occupation prisons” (terrorists jailed in Israel).

In Our Beautiful Language, Vol.1 fourth graders study the colorfully illustrated adventures of Palestinian Arab refugee children victimized by “the many explosions made by the Zionist gangs.” Grade 4’s edition of Mathematics, Vol. 1 explains calculus by comparing the number of “martyrs” who died fighting against Israel in the First and Second Intifadas.

These themes continue for older students. Among the mandatory texts for fifth graders is Arabic Language, Vol.2, which extols the massacre leader Dalal Mughrabi as a “hero” and a “moon that never sets but illuminates the darkness of our dark night.” Such individuals “have an important position in every nation…. We are proud of them, sing their praise, learn the history of their lives, name our children after them, and name streets, squares, and prominent cultural sites after them…. Every one of us wishes to be like them….These heroes are the crown of their nation, they are a symbol of its glory, they are the best of the best, the best of the noble people.”… Islamic Education, Vol.2 for fifth graders includes a “Topic for discussion”: “The Zionist Occupation desecrating the graves of the Companions of the Prophet and the Righteous Ones, shoveling them away and removing them from Muslim cemeteries…” Eighth graders learn reading comprehension from a story in Arabic Language, Vol.2 about brave Palestinian fighters who "cut the necks” of Israelis and "turn their bodies into fire, burning the Zionist tank." ,,, Arabic Language for grade 11 includes a poem glorifying the “falcons in their Intifadas” who “climb ever higher on their ladder of gushing blood.”

In the twelfth grade, Islamic Education presents an especially detailed treatise on "the virtue of jihad in Islam,” especially “if the enemy occupied a Muslim land”; and on the importance of jihad both as "one of the gates to achieving martyrdom” and as Allah’s way to achieve “rescue from the fire of Hell and the attainment of pardon and Paradise.”…

UNRWA's Hate Education

In addition to the thousands of schools operated by the PA or Hamas, there are 370 schools, serving more than 320,000 students, in Gaza or PA-governed territory that are financed and run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), established to assist Palestinian Arab refugees from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. While the UN is officially committed to nonviolence and interfaith coexistence, UNRWA schools have consistently echoed the extremist views of the PA and Hamas governing regimes.

UNRWA schools use the same textbooks as PA and Hamas schools, and develop their own supplementary educational materials. An UNRWA booklet on Arabic language comprehension urges fifth grade students to savor "the smell of the ground mixed with the blood of martyrs.” A teacher's guide for Grade 6 Arabic language instructs teachers to explain to students that “The Zionists are the terrorists of the modern age, and they are fated to disappear." A language comprehension edition for ninth graders characterizes a firebombing attack on an Israeli bus as "a barbecue party" and asks students to "explain the beauty of the metaphor" in the sentence, "The Zionist gangs sank their fangs of hatred into her pure body.” A teacher’s guide for Grade 10 history and geography instructs teachers to deduct points from students who fail to "tie the perpetration of Zionist massacres to Jewish religious thought.”

These examples are not isolated instances. A study by UN Watch and IMPACT-se of supplementary materials introduced in the UNRWA school curricula in 2021-2022 found “a systematic insertion of violence, martyrdom, overt antisemitism, and jihad across all grades and subjects with the proliferation of extreme nationalism and Islamist ideologies throughout the curriculum… rejection of the possibility of peace with Israel; and the complete omission of any historical Jewish presence in the modern-day territories of Israel and the PA.”…

Matriculation and Martyrdom

A preparatory matriculation test in PA schools asks:

• “Punctuate the underlined phrase: ‘We shall die in order that our land may live'

• “Add the verb ‘to be’, or a verb that follows the same form, to the following sentence, and punctuate accordingly: ‘Palestinian women are fighters.’

• “Punctuate the underlined phrase: ‘Do not view the occupier as human’

At the same time, PA officials promote the message that murdering Jews is more important than passing matriculation exams. Speaking at the PA Ministry of Education’s 2017 end-of-year ceremony for young people in Ramallah who passed their matriculation exam, the PA’s governor for the Ramallah-El Bireh district, Laila Ghannam, singled out the mothers of “Martyr Muhammad Hattab” and “Martyr Laith Al-Khaledi,” two teenagers who had recently been killed while attempting to burn Jews to death with Molotov cocktails. The latter, she noted, “received the news of her son's death as a Martyr on the same day that they announced the results of the matriculation exams,” when she was thinking of her son’s future, and yet she responded, “There is nothing better than sons who have died as Martyrs.”….
Another student who famously missed his exam because he was serving what was deemed a higher purpose was Muhammad Halabi. The nineteen-year-old Al-Quds University law student brutally attacked a young Israeli family on their way to the Western Wall in October 2015—stabbing the father (a rabbi) to death with a butcher knife, slashing the rabbi’s wife and two-year-old son, fatally stabbing a passerby who tried to intervene; and then shooting at onlookers before Israeli police killed him. Speakers at the next Al-Quds commencement ceremony heaped praise on Halabi, and university leaders presented his family with his diploma, even though he had not completed the graduation requirements. The PA Bar Association also awarded him a posthumous law degree….

Hateful TV and Videos

Children’s programs on PA and Hamas television and radio stations convey similar messages. On the PA’s TV program “The Best Home,” children are interviewed or invited to read their poetry before an audience of other children. In a typical episode in 2017, a young girl replied to the host's request to explain the term “martyr”: “A Martyr [Shahid] is a person who has sacrificed his life in order to elevate the Word of Allah. A person becomes a Martyr when he defends his homeland or honor, or fights those who don't believe in Allah Almighty. Martyrdom-death [Shahada] is a high and supreme level, according to Allah.” In another episode, a Palestinian Arab boy recited a poem pledging "For you, Yasir Arafat, for you we shall die…. our blood is food for the revolution.….” A young girl proclaimed, "O Palestinian carrying a rifle--shoot, shoot, in the name of Allah!”

Televised poetry readings are commonly used for teaching hateful ideology. To mark World Children’s Day in 2015, PA Television featured a young girl reciting: “Sons of Zion / …. Jerusalem vomits from within it your impurity.…” On the Hamas children’s show “Pioneers of Tomorrow,” shown on its official television channel, Al-Aqsa TV, Nassur the host, clad in a bear costume, vowed to join the military division of Hamas, the Izz A-Din Al-Qassam Brigades. “I will be a Jihad fighter with them and I will carry a rifle,” he declared in one episode. Then he asked a young girl, “Do you know why, Saraa? To defend the children of Palestine…. I declare war on the criminal Zionists. Not only me, me and you. You are ready, right, Saraa?" Saraa replied, “We are all ready to sacrifice ourselves for our homeland!” In another episode, a host in a rabbit costume explained why his name is “Assud,” the Arabic word for lion: “I, Assud, will finish off the Jews and eat them, Allah willing.” When another host, Nahoul, clad in a bee costume, was dying, because of Israel, a child host assured him, “Today we say congratulations, O Nahoul, this is your wedding, Nahoul. We don't see it as your death, Nahoul, but as your wedding, Nahoul.”

The “wedding” idea is an outgrowth of Quranic verses and Islamist literature frequently cited by Palestinian leaders to prove that a male who dies as a shahid—a religious martyr, defined by Hamas and the PA as anyone killed while carrying out a terrorist attack against Israel, or by Israeli forces responding to terrorism—is rewarded in Paradise with seventy-two dark-eyed, “high-bosomed” virgins, or houris. Many parents of dead terrorists have proclaimed their deaths to be the “wedding” preceding their unification with their “brides” in the afterlife….

Until faced with international criticism and the prospect of legal action, both Hamas and the PA utilized iconic American cartoon characters to promote anti-Jewish hatred and violence. Hamas TV used a Mickey Mouse figure, whom it eventually wrote off by having him beaten to death by an Israeli soldier. Fatah TV used Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Winnie the Pooh, and Piglet as the backdrop of a children’s quiz which described mass murderer Dalal Mughrabi as a “beloved bride, daughter of Jaffa, jasmine flower” who was “escorted [in death] with your friends and the flag of Palestine.”…

A PA Television interview with two young Palestinian Arab girls, and a third calling in to the studio, illustrated their absorption of the regime's messaging on violence and death. Asked whether she considered martyrdom “beautiful,” 11-year-old Walla replied: “Martyrdom is a very, very beautiful thing. Everyone yearns for martyrdom. What could be sweeter than going to paradise?” Asked if she agreed, Yussra, also 11, responded, “Of course, martyrdom is sweet. We don't want this world, we want the Afterlife. We benefit not from this life, but from the Afterlife….Every Palestinian child, say someone aged 12, says: ‘O Allah, I would like to become a martyr.’” A girl named Sabrine, from Ramallah, then called in to point out that Ayyat al-Akhras, who murdered two Israelis and wounded 28 in a Jerusalem suicide bombing, was just 17 years old “when she blew herself up.” The host asked: “Sabrine, are you for it or against it”; she answered: "Of course I support blowing up, it is our right.” The host questioned: “Sabrine, now, is it natural that Ayyat Al-Akhras blows herself up?”; Sabrine said: “Of course it's natural.”…

Martyr Games

To promote the concept of “martyrdom” as the highest spiritual achievement in a Muslim’s life, the PA and Fatah teach children The Martyr Game. Illustrating how to play the game, Fatah’s Facebook page displays photographs of a child pretending to be dead, wrapped in a Palestinian flag and being carried on a makeshift stretcher by other children. “All the children of the world play regular games, except for your children, O Palestine, who play ‘The Martyr Game,’” the accompanying text explains. “A thousand blessings to your children, Palestine.” Observing children preparing to play the game, a reporter for the PA newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida recounted: “A seven year-old girl says to her friends, ‘Let’s play The Martyr Game!’ The children… argue who will play the Martyr. Fa’iz, six years old, says, ‘You were the Martyr yesterday, today it’s my turn! I’m younger than you. I’ll be the one to die!” On October 22, 2023, two weeks after the atrocities of October 7, Al-Jazeera TV aired a video clip showing four and five year-old Gazan girls playing The Martyr Game: "We’re playing Martyr,” a young girl says, “The Martyr is the beloved of Allah.”

A related game popular among Palestinian Arab children involves the actual body of a “martyr.” Al-Hayat Al-Jadida reported the scene as a body was carried through a neighborhood: “A boy is hanging out the window of a room and watching the parting from the Martyr…. He comes out quickly and tries to touch the head of the Martyr. He wants to reach the glory in order to brag to his friends that he touched a Martyr.”…

Summer Camps of Terror

When school lets out, the violent antisemitic messaging continues in hundreds of summer camps operated by the PA and Hamas in their respective territories. Many of the camps are named after terror icons Dalal Mughrabi and Abu Jihad.

In the summer of 2023, 65,000 boys and girls ages 13 to 17 attended the PA’s 648 camps. The summer’s theme was “Moons and Not Numbers”— that is, glorifying dead terrorists as “moons, they are stars, they are the elite, and they were the ones who sacrificed their lives,” Jibril Rajoub, head of the PLO Supreme Council for Youth and Sports, explained. “They were and will remain in our memories and in the memory of their children and their grandchildren….[They] are recorded in our hearts.” Activities included performing skits about Israelis cruelly persecuting Arabs and Arabs shooting or stabbing Israelis, art projects spotlighting dead or imprisoned terrorists, singalongs featuring songs about martyrdom, making maps out of paint, clay, or rocks showing all of Israel as “Palestine,” and face painting with PLO flags in the shape of all of Israel.

In addition to ideological indoctrination, many of the camps include significant military components. Video posted on Fatah’s Facebook page shows high school age boys at a 2023 summer camp training in close combat and learning how to assemble and use Kalashnikov assault rifles. Another 2023 camp video, posted on the Facebook page of Fatah’s Awdah Television channel, shows boys learning how to handle assault rifles and practice shooting positions, with a PA security force member explaining that the forces collaborate with regional Fatah branches to run summer camps because “the occupation is always lying in ambush for us, and we need to deal with it intellectually, culturally, mentally, and in struggle, in every field.” A PLO youth council video of a 2022 summer camp features campers in military fatigues (and some wearing shirts bearing images of terrorists) armed with automatic rifles, in a drill simulation of moving from house to house. Campers also leap over burning trenches, navigate obstacle courses, and emerge from tunnels amidst clouds of black smoke..

Photos from an Islamic Jihad summer camp in Gaza posted by Gaza-based Palestinian Arab journalist Muthanna Najjar show teens participating in military training exercises such as maneuvering around obstacles on their bellies and hiding in dug-out spaces. The accompanying text reads: “The culture of weapons, tunnels, first aid, religious studies, sermons about Prophet Muhammad’s life, blessing and peace to him, and the laws of purity are characteristics of the Jihad camp run by the Islamic Jihad movement titled ‘Resistance Campers.’”

Najjar also posted photographs of the Hamas-run “Liberation Pioneers Camp” in 2016 showing teenage boys in military fatigues marching in formation and lining up at attention with rifles in hand. According to Palestinian news reports, some 20,000 campers participated in the Hamas “Liberation Pioneers” summer camps in 2015, where they were trained “to carry weapons and use them, and for additional military training.” On October 7, 2023, those boys would have been in their early 20s.

Terrorist Role Models for Girls

A memorable controversy erupted in September 1995, when Yasser Arafat delivered what became known as his “Abir and Dalal speech.” Since Western monitoring of the Palestinian Arab news media was still in its infancy, many Americans were shocked to learn that the Palestinian Authority chairman kicked off the new school year with an address to a girls school in Gaza about the importance of following in the footsteps of famous women terrorists. He focused on two role models: the aforementioned Dalal Mughrabi and Abir al-Wahidi, a Birzeit University student who gunned down an Israeli civilian. “We are proud of the Palestinian girl, the Palestinian woman [who] participated in the Palestinian revolution,” Arafat told the audience of teenage girls. “I bow in respect and admiration to the Palestinian woman who receives her martyred son with joyful cheering. The soul and blood for you, O Palestine!”

Women terrorists occupy a unique position in the Palestinian Arab pantheon. IMPACT-se found that thirteen PA schoolbooks used in 2023-2024 “express diverse forms of contempt towards women, singularly accusing them of impeding Islamic missionary work, of propagating adultery, and of blindly imitating Western culture." Students are taught that sexual harassment results from “women not being dressed according to Islamic code.” There is one exception. Women are presented as equal to men when they are “conducting jihad, becoming martyrs, and sacrificing sons and husbands,” which makes them “sisters to the men in sacrifice and altruism.” Textbooks esteem women “ in the context of… their ‘nationalist struggle role’ fighting against the Zionist occupation ‘in all forms and ways,’” as in [the books’] “glorification of female terrorists, such as Dalal Mughrabi, as role models.” Women terrorists are cited as evidence that “Islam raised the status of women, and honored them in a way no other religion had honored.” As a result, “the path of violence implicitly appears to be the only option for women to demonstrate an outstanding commitment to their people and country.”

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Excerpted with permission from The Road to October 7: Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War Against the Jews by Rafael Medoff (The Jewish Publication Society). Publication date: October 1, 2025. Now available for preorder. The full volume contains extensive endnotes sourcing all of the author's findings. To receive the notes referenced solely in this excerpt, or to contact the author more generally, email info@wymaninstitute.org.

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Rafael Medoff (PhD, Yeshiva University, 1991) is founding director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, which focuses on America’s response to the Holocaust, and co-editor of the Institute’s Online Encyclopedia of America’s Response to the Holocaust. He has authored numerous books about American Jewish history, the Holocaust, and related topics, among them America and the Holocaust: A Documentary History (JPS, 2022); The Jews Should Keep Quiet: FDR, Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust (JPS, 2019); We Spoke Out: Comic Books and the Holocaust, coauthored with Neal Adams and Craig Yoe] (IDW Books, 2018); Too Little, and Almost Too Late: The War Refugee Board and America’s Response to the Holocaust (Wyman Institute, 2017); and FDR and the Holocaust: A Breach of Faith (Wyman Institute, 2013).