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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://qudsnen.com/post?id=68264&slug=palestinian-schools-in-occupied-jerusalem-suspend-classes-as-israel-denies-teachers-permits">qudsnen.com</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Palestinian Schools in Occupied Jerusalem Suspend Classes as Israel Denies Teachers' Permits</h1><div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Quds News Network</div>August 31, 2026<div>
<img src="https://fsn1.your-objectstorage.com/devlo-cms/quds/uploads/2026/08/file_6a95b933596fb.webp" alt="Palestinian Schools in Occupied Jerusalem Suspend Classes as Israel Denies Teachers' Permits" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" width="452" height="254" style="margin-right: 25px;">
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Israel imposes its curriculum on all new grades in
occupied Jerusalem schools, seizes UNRWA schools, denies Palestinian
teachers' permits, and imports Jewish teachers, to erase Palestinian
education.
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<p>For the first time since Israel occupied and annexed
East Jerusalem in 1967, every newly opened grade in the city's public
schools will teach the Israeli curriculum instead of the Palestinian
one, as the school year begins, marking a major escalation in Israel's
long campaign to strip Palestinians in occupied Jerusalem of their
national education and identity.</p>
<p>According to Israeli reporting, all new first-grade and seventh-grade
classes in the state education system in occupied Jerusalem will use
the Israeli curriculum this year. More than 45,000 of the roughly
120,000 Palestinian students in the city, some 38 percent, will now
study the Israeli program, up from single digits just 15 years ago and
fewer than 13,000 students only six years ago. The shift is the fruit of
a deliberate, years-long Israeli effort to "Israelize" Palestinian
schools, driven by funding incentives dangled before principals, a 2018
government plan explicitly designed to fund the Israelization of the
city's schools, and Israeli laws that stripped academic recognition from
graduates of Palestinian universities in the occupied West Bank,
coercing Palestinian families toward the Israeli system by closing off
the alternatives.</p>
<p>The imposition of the curriculum is only one front in the assault on
Palestinian education. Israel has also moved to seize the schools of
UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, in the city. After
passing laws banning the agency, Israeli forces shut down its six
schools in occupied Jerusalem, and the Jerusalem occupation municipality
has now taken over two large UNRWA compounds to open Israeli schools in
their place. In the Shuafat refugee camp, the municipality seized the
school UNRWA built in the 1960s, and in Kafr Aqab it took over the
Qalandiya vocational training center it stormed just last week, the last
UNRWA facility operating in the city, to convert it into an Israeli-run
boys' school.</p>
<p>At the same time, Israel is squeezing the Palestinian teachers who
form the backbone of the city's independent schools. Private schools
across occupied Jerusalem have been forced to suspend classes until
further notice because Israel refused to renew the work permits of their
teachers, leaving thousands of Palestinian students without instruction
and holding the education of an entire community hostage to Israeli
bureaucratic coercion. The permit denial is a powerful lever: by choking
off the ability of Palestinian teachers to work, Israel pressures
schools toward the Israeli system and erodes the Palestinian educational
institutions that have resisted it.</p>
<p>Those Palestinian teachers who remain are being watched. A recent
investigation revealed that Israel's Education Ministry has been
secretly surveilling teachers over their social media posts, hunting not
only for what it calls incitement but for any criticism of the Israeli
government, and that three of every four teachers targeted are
Palestinians. The surveillance, building secret intelligence files from
screenshots and police and Shin Bet data without the teachers'
knowledge, is designed to intimidate Palestinian educators into silence
and to purge those who will not conform.</p>
<p>As it purges Palestinian teachers, Israel is importing Jewish ones.
The Israeli government has launched its first national "aliyah program"
to recruit Jewish teachers from North America to come and teach in
Israel, actively bringing in foreign Jewish immigrants to staff its
classrooms even as it denies permits to the Palestinian teachers already
living in occupied Jerusalem. The contrast lays bare the logic of the
entire campaign: the replacement of Palestinians with Jewish settlers
and immigrants, applied to the school system as it is applied to the
land.</p>
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