Gaza City- The Interior Ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip expressed "astonishment" Monday that the curricula taught in schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) mention the Holocaust, the Nazi genocide of the Jews of Europe during World War II. The ministry statement came after a pro-Hamas group in the salient, the Popular Committees of Palestinian Refugees, demanded that UNRWA delete Holocaust, which it called a "big lie," from the curricula taught in its schools in the Strip.
The office of UNRWA Gaza chief John Ging confirmed that it had received such a letter, but denied earlier reports that that Holocaust is taught in its schools.
"Such reports are totally untrue. The current curricula taught to pupils at UNRWA schools do not contain anything on the subject of the Holocaust," Adnan Abu Hasna, UNRWA's Gaza spokesman, told the German Press Agency, dpa.
The interior ministry statement Monday called on the Hamas ministry of education to investigate the matter.
"We reject teaching our pupils such thoughts and strange culture that contradicts with our Palestinian beliefs," the statement said.
In its letter to UNRWA, the Popular Committees for Palestinian Refugees said called on the UN body to "erase the subject of the Jewish Holocaust from the pupils curricula, and to stop any future attempt to insert strange concepts or cultures which contradict with the Palestinian values and principles."
It said it had discovered that "the Human Rights textbook, which is taught to the 8th grade pupils (aged 13), includes an explanation about the Jewish Holocaust."
"The subject was shown in a way that confirms the occurrence of the Jewish Holocaust and it excites sympathy with the Jews," the letter said.
The letter added that the Popular Committees "strongly reject teaching our children this big lie which was fabricated by the Jews and a big campaign of propaganda circulated for it."
"We are against it because first it is not true and exaggerated and second because those who added it to our curricula aim at playing with the emotions of our children,' the Committees said.
UNRWA educates some 200,000 refugee children in the impoverished, densely-populated Gaza Strip, now ruled by Hamas after it succeeded in routing forces loyal to the Palestinian Authority and to President Mahmoud Abbas in June 2007.
The Popular Committee said UNRWA needed to focus on educating Palestinian schoolchildren about the "Nakba" or Catastrophe, the name Palestinians use to describe the establishment of Israel.
The term is an unpopular one among most Israeli Jews, and Israeli Minister of Education Gideon Saar announced Sunday plans to drop it from textbooks.
He told the cabinet at its weekly meeting that, while what Arab-Israelis had experienced in 1948 was a "tragedy," in the context of the textbooks, the word "nakba" was similar to the world "holocaust," and so could not be used in textbooks taught in Arab-Israeli schools.
A spokesman for the Follow-up Committee on Arab Education in Israel told the Jerusalem Post daily that Saar's decision was a "political gimmick" aimed at denying Arab-Israelis their identity.
