Gaza’s Hamas government said on Tuesday it had added studies to encourage "resistance to Israel" to curriculum in local public schools. Courses to "strengthen Palestinian rights, update programs and add studies on human rights" would be introduced at three levels in secondary schools, Hamas Education Minister Muetassem al-Minaui told the AFP news agency. They were intended to instill "faith in the role of the resistance to win rights and to raise awareness of the importance of effective preparations to face the enemy," he said. The new material, seen by AFP , tells of Israel's winter 2008-2009 and November 2012 counterterrorism operations in Gaza, and shows photos of dead Palestinian Authority Arabs and of buildings destroyed by Israeli airstrikes. "All of Palestine from the (Mediterranean) sea to the river (Jordan) belongs to us, to us Muslims," it states, according to the news agency. The new courses will be taught only in education ministry schools and not those of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), in which close to half of the 463,000 pupils in Gaza study, the agency's operations director Robert Turner told journalists on Tuesday. While UNRWA schools may not include Hamas’s latest inciting courses, its summer camps educate children to wage war against Israel, as reported in the past by Arutz Sheva . At the start of this year, Hamas launched an experimental program of basic military training for about 10,000 high school students, according to AFP . Hamas has also used cartoons promoting its “military wing”, the Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades, in an attempt to educate young children about resistance. The organization is also offering classes in Hebrew in its Gaza schools. These courses are intended to “teach the language of the enemy.” Hamas’s Education Ministry has chosen to use photocopied worksheets for these courses, rather than purchasing texts from the abhorred “Zionist enemy.”
