In a Gaza classroom, a child draws a Palestinian flag and then tries to depict an Israeli one.
Asked by his teacher what he is doing, the boy explains that he wants both flags on the page. He is tired of war and wants peace.
The boy has never actually seen the blue and white flag, says Dr David Hasan, the Palestinian-American neurosurgeon recounting the exchange, but he is imagining an Israeli neighbour without another war.
That is the ambition of Hasan’s audacious project: to give Gaza’s children an education without hatred.
His Gaza Children Village (GCV), which opened its first classroom little more than a year ago, was recently teaching 21,000 children, he tells the JC from Duke University Hospital in North Carolina in between operations. Its 14 “Academies of Hope” increased to 30 at the end of last month, and now serves almost 25,000 pupils and employs more than 400 staff.
Children at a GCV Academy of Hope (Instagram)[Missing Credit]
Teaching in a war zone is difficult enough, but Hasan is also rewriting the Palestinian Authority curriculum, vetting teachers for their propensity towards revenge and developing an AI-assisted microphone that will alert him if a lesson turns hateful.
Before the war, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa) educated around 300,000 children in Gaza. But some of its staff were involved in the Hamas-led attack on October 7. Now Unicef (United Nations Children’s Fund) supports most schools in Gaza, working with the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Education, while Hamas still de facto owns other schools.
Israel has repeatedly accused the Palestinian Authority of teaching children with extremist materials. The GCV has taken those lessons and, without the permission of the PA, stripped all glorification of violence.
In GCV materials, a maths problem comparing numbers of “martyrs” killed in the two intifadas has become a question about a West Bank football match.
A reading passage praising Dalal Mughrabi, who led a deadly attack on Israeli civilians in 1978, has been replaced by one about Hind al-Husseini, a Palestinian educator.
An Islamic studies passage about an attempt by Jews to kill the Prophet Muhammad has given way to one emphasising his respect for Jews.
Then there are new lessons on Judaism and Christianity, as well as other world religions, and on the displacement of Jews from countries across the Middle East and North Africa.
“We try to show them the different narratives, so the Nakba in 1948 happened, 850,000 Palestinians were displaced. But our kids don’t understand that around that time, there was another Nakba for the Jewish people,” Hasan explains.
Changing the books is only part of Hasan’s effort.
He worried that staff would be “indoctrinated with the old system,” so all employees are screened through Israeli and American counterterror vetting processes, and any who have worked with Hamas or Unrwa are barred from employment.
They then complete a psychological questionnaire, developed with researchers at Stanford University, according to Hasan, comprising nearly 50 questions about attitudes towards violence and revenge.
It sorts candidates into three groups: the open-minded and empathetic; those “still finding their way”; and the “hateful, resentful and revengeful”. The GCV does not hire from the third group.
Jason Olson, former Board of Peace deradicalisation director, who spoke about the project in the UK parliament this month, says one in three legacy staff fail the test.
And though teachers are carefully selected, there is still a fear that they could “revert to old ways of teaching,” so Hasan explains that consultants join classes remotely without warning.
But that is still not enough to protect the project.
So his team has developed an AI-powered microphone.
Gaza Children Village founder, Dr David Hasan, Professor of Neurosurgery, Biomedical Engineering and Neurology at Duke University (Duke University)[Missing Credit]
Still a prototype, this will record lessons, store them in the cloud for 72 hours, analyse the content, and send him an alert, a recording and a transcript if it detected something “hateful or antisemitic”.
He will review the extract and call the teacher. If the allegation was justified, they will be fired.
He knows what critics will say. “In Western countries, parents, teachers and liberal people will freak out about violating privacy.”
But the stakes are too high for Hasan to let a rogue teacher disrupt the GCV.
“We’re not going to risk having people maliciously come in and infiltrate our system and teach bad things. It is a safety net.”
Hasan, 54, a father of one, was born in Kuwait to a Palestinian family from the West Bank.
At 18, he moved to the US, where he met Jews for the first time and began friendships that have endured.
In December 2023, he joined one of the first medical missions to Gaza, and saw the horrors of war up close.
He witnessed children die from injuries that could have been treated had help arrived sooner, and orphans killed with nobody left to mourn them.
With medicines limited, he had to withhold treatment from some children to save others with a better chance of survival.
What he experienced in Gaza could have turned another person against Israel, but Hasan also visited the kibbutzim attacked by Hamas on October 7.
His response was to build something beyond the operating theatre that meant “never again for both sides”.
“One can either indulge and become angry, hateful and create another cycle. That is what has happened in Gaza before.
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” he says.
In the paradigm shift of the GCV, the first-ever pro-Israel curriculum in Gaza or the West Bank, “we try to give these kids for the first time a different lens, a different narrative to see and interact with the world”.
He is under no illusion that the schools will make extremists disappear. “There is always going to be extremism on both sides. But we should not allow them to control us and besiege us and control the narrative.
“You have to find a way forward and try to rebuild bridges,” he adds.
For the children coming through its makeshift classroom tents, that begins with food and care. The academies work with World Central Kitchen to provide hot lunches and bread, give pupils winter coats and they have medical staff on site. Classes of 25 to 30 run in two shifts, from 8am to 11am and noon to 3pm, with lunch in between.
But school guards, on duty round the clock, cannot protect children everywhere. One girl was shot in the arm by a stray bullet while walking to school. Two brothers were caught in a building during a bombing; one was killed.
[Missing Credit]
These are the pupils he is asking to consider another future. “We are teaching our kids about civil discourse, that it is OK to have different opinions,” he says.
A GCV cartoon, with its first episode planned for November, will teach children “about interfaith, interaction, understanding different religions, understand empathy, respect.
“It will encourage what we call global citizen virtues, trying to prepare our students to [become] a global citizen who can assimilate in any country around the world.”
The changes have not been welcomed everywhere. The PA resents modifications to its curriculum, Hamas poses a continuous threat, and local clans have had to be won over. One condition of operating, he says, is that the charity should avoid discussing the curriculum publicly.
That is difficult for an organisation seeking donors for precisely this work. And the vocabulary has had to shift – lessons that once referred to Israel directly now use the word “neighbour”.
He has had to work to build trust with leadership and families, assuring them that children’s Palestinian identity will remain central to the curricula.
“We are not there to brainwash their kids,” Hasan says. “We are not there to erase their identity, we are actually solidifying it in a good, peaceful, civilised way.”
Hasan puts the cost of nine months’ schooling at $260 per child at GCV.
Olson, a former US navy officer, says that keeping children out of the reach of terrorists is in the West’s interests, contrasting the cost of GCV with what he puts at a $17,000 price to the US if children become radicalised.
“There is a policy case,” Olson told a meeting in parliament. Others have suggested GCV is a good response to the deradicalisation task in Donald Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan.
For now, the academies depend on charity and many donors are Jewish, including the UK-based Pears Foundation. At the start of term, a funding shortfall threatened to close six of the schools, but an Israeli businessman whose daughter was killed alongside her boyfriend at the Nova music festival on October 7 came up with a donation to support the GCV’s work.
Hasan says he is “creating a platform where Israelis and Gazans are working with each other – and they are”.
He hopes to also inspire Israeli schools to reciprocate and humanise Palestinians in their curriculum. “It has to be both sides,” he says.
Asked how he measures success, he points to the academies staying open for an academic year and welcoming children back this month. There is also going to be an international delegation inspecting the schools later this year.
Then he tells the story of a 13-year-old girl who had been sent home from another school for not wearing a hijab. He was asked if his academy could take her at very short notice.
She was immediately welcomed to the GCV, provided with a backpack and school supplies.
A few hours later, she called him on WhatsApp: “Thank you uncle for giving me an opportunity to learn.”
“This is the difference we make,” he says.
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