Xbox, Nintendo games may soon be used to teach Gaza children about Holocaust

Xbox and Nintendo video games may soon be used to teach children in Gaza about the Holocaust, David Hasan, founder and president of Gaza Children Village, said at an NGO Monitor-hosted panel on Thursday.

“We have games that we’re going to take for after school, and for Xbox, Nintendo, and the kids will play on it,” Hasan, who is of Palestinian descent, said during a question-and-answer portion of the discussion.

“The whole theme of it is, again, collaboration, empathy and, for the first time, we’re going to teach about Holocaust,” he said.

Hasan said the project would involve the U.S. embassy and is an effort to stay ahead of radicalization efforts in Gaza.

“You have to always be in the mentality that they 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 U.S. embassy would play. A spokesman for NGO Monitor told JNS that Hasan could not speak to reporters for the next few weeks due to sensitivities of the project.

Hasan spoke during a panel titled “Gaza: From Security to Strategy” at Reichman University’s International Institute for Counter-Terrorism World Summit, during which panelists discussed Gaza’s reconstruction, disarmament and deradicalization, with a particular focus on education.

Gaza Children Village opened its first academy in the Strip in July 2025 and has since expanded to 21 academies serving some 22,000 children, Hasan said during the panel.

The organization uses the Palestinian Authority curriculum as its base but removes material it considers hateful or inciting and replaces it with alternative examples, he told attendees.

For example, math problems asking children to count “martyrs” from the First and Second Intifadas were replaced with questions about soccer players and fans, and an exercise involving the trajectory of a weapon aimed at an Israeli soldier was swapped for one involving an Olympic javelin throw, he said.

“For the first time, we have the map that says ‘Israel,’” Hasan said.

Gerald Steinberg, founder and president of NGO Monitor, told JNS after the panel that he is “cautiously optimistic” about the project.

The Gaza Children’s Village is a “unique project,” he said.

“Not just a lot of words and Band-Aids, but a serious attempt, with significant backing, to begin a process,” he told JNS. “I want to emphasize, to begin a process of changing the educational process in Gaza away from the incitement and support for terror, the hate, replacing the existing structure, which includes UNRWA and other frameworks.”

Steinberg said that Hamas has “manipulated” many nonprofits operating in Gaza, so they are barred from operating unless they comply with Israeli security vetting. Gaza Children Village is “not under that category,” he told JNS.

“They have not refused to work with security frameworks that are necessary to prevent a repetition of the infrastructure that the NGOs knowingly helped build, 500 kilometers of terrorist tunnels in hospitals and mosques and under residences, that allowed Oct. 7 to take place,” he said.

“That cannot. Israel is not going to allow Hamas and its network, including NGOs, U.N. agencies, to rebuild that,” he said. “It’s just not. It’s not.”

“Israel cannot allow that to happen, no matter how much the NGOs and their lobbyists continue to demand that,” he told JNS.

Hasan told the panel he wants the U.N. Relief and Works Agency to be dismantled, but an alternative must be built at the same time to prevent other actors from filling the ensuing vacuum.

UNRWA teachers and other educators were among 101 current or former employees whom the U.S. Agency for International Development Office of Inspector General referred to the State Department in June for possible suspension or debarment over alleged participation in the Oct. 7 attacks or affiliation with Hamas.

The group included school principals and teachers identified by investigators as Hamas commanders, intelligence operatives and, in one case, a sniper.

“You can’t create a gap and wait four or five years to find a viable alternative,” Hasan said at the event. “You have to do it simultaneously.”

Steinberg told JNS that he thinks UNRWA should have no role in a future educational framework in Gaza.

“There are different views,” he said. “My own personal view is that UNRWA needs to be taken away entirely from the structure and the process.”

“Not only is there nothing UNRWA contributes, but their history and their track record shows that whatever may be agreed upon in theory, UNRWA will go back to its current and long-standing history of being used by Palestinian leadership to reinforce and to continue what led to the catastrophes in Gaza and elsewhere,” he said.

Steinberg doesn’t know how Gaza Children Village would fit into a transition away from UNRWA but said that the project could offer an alternative where few currently exist.

“It’s very important to have initiatives and not simply talk about and focus on all of the existing failures in the system,” he told JNS. “I think one has to be very cautious, because it’s unique and it’s going to be difficult to implement. But at the same time, it does provide, potentially, an alternative where no other ones exist.”

Hasan said during the panel that the organization vets prospective teachers through Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories and uses a 50-question psychological profiling test. The nonprofit has also installed cameras and microphones powered by artificial intelligence in classrooms that record lessons and are designed to flag antisemitic or hateful remarks, he said.

The recordings are stored for 72 hours, and the system can send an alert within about 20 minutes when language is flagged, according to Hasan.

“Some are bad apples, trust me, but some are just—that’s the culture. Just that’s how they grow of it,” he told attendees.

The monitoring, he said, is intended in part to give teachers feedback as they learn to teach material they have not previously taught.

Changing the education system is essential to any effort to deradicalize Gaza, Steinberg told JNS.

“Every day, you can see, every day, videos of Palestinian children in Gaza who were used and exploited by Hamas and the other organizations as child soldiers, as child terrorists, for the incitement,” he said.

“The changing educational system is central to ‘deradicalizing,’ as the phrase is used, the Palestinian population and future generations,” he said.

“The only way that they’re going to be deradicalized is to change the education system completely,” he told JNS. “That’s also what the Children’s Village does.”