Xbox and Nintendo video games will be used to teach children in Gaza about the Holocaust, according to proposals from a charity that works in the region.
A US-based non-governmental organisation, the Gaza Children Village, hopes to foster “collaboration [and] empathy” for Jewish people among schoolchildren through gaming, and to prevent radicalisation/
Unveiling the plan at a panel discussion on Thursday, Gaza Children Village co-founder and president, US-Palestinian neurosurgeon and university professor Dr David Hasan, said: “We have games that we’re going to take for after school, and for Xbox, Nintendo, and the kids will play on it.”
He continued: “The whole theme of it is ... collaboration, empathy and, for the first time, we’re going to teach about Holocaust.”
The project could involve input from the US embassy and is an effort to stay ahead of radicalisation efforts in Gaza, he said,
“You have to always be in the mentality that they [terrorists] are smarter than you are,” Hasan said. “Don’t get comfortable, because the minute you get comfortable, you will be defeated.”
It was not immediately clear when the games would be introduced or what role, if any, the US embassy would play.
Hasan was speaking at a panel event on Gaza at Israel’s Reichman University, as part of an event organised by its international institute for counter-terrorism, during which panellists discussed Gaza’s reconstruction, disarmament and deradicalisation, with a particular focus on education.
Gaza Children Village opened its first academy in the Gaza Strip in July 2025 and has since expanded to 21 academies serving some 22,000 children, Hasan said.
The organisation uses the Palestinian Authority curriculum as its base but removes material it considers hateful or inciting and replaces it with alternative examples.
Hasan gave the example of maths problems asking children to count “martyrs” from the First and Second Intifadas being replaced with questions about football players and fans. In another case, an exercise involving the trajectory of a weapon aimed at an Israeli soldier was swapped for one involving an Olympic javelin throw, he said.
As the JC has previously reported, while teachers are carefully selected by the charity, there is still a fear that they could “revert to old ways of teaching.”
In addition to consultants joining classes remotely to monitor content, the charity has developed an AI-powered microphone – still a prototype – to 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”.
Hasan will review the extract and call the teacher. If the allegation was justified, they will be fired.
Gerald Steinberg, founder and president of the Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor, a right-wing watchdog, said he was “cautiously optimistic” about the project.
The Gaza Children’s Village is a “unique project,” Steinberg said.
“Not just a lot of words and Band-Aids, but a serious attempt, with significant backing, to begin a process.
Changing the education system is essential to any effort to deradicalise Gaza, Steinberg believes.
“Every day, you can see … videos of Palestinian children in Gaza who were used and exploited by Hamas and the other organisations as child soldiers, as child terrorists, for the incitement,” he said.
“The changing educational system is central to ‘deradicalising’, as the phrase is used, the Palestinian population and future generations,” he continued.
“The only way that they’re going to be deradicalised is to change the education system completely.”
To get more news, click here to sign up for our free daily newsletter.