How Israel’s financial strangulation of the West Bank is killing Palestinian public education
A closed school during the Palestinian teachers’ strike in the West Bank city of Nablus on 7 March 2023
Qassam Muaddi reports in Mondoweiss on 29 June 2026:
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Omar Muheisen works only three days a week, which varies from one week to another, because the Palestinian Ministry of Education reduced teachers’ working hours beginning in October 2023. This reduction was taken to adapt to the growing Palestinian financial crisis, caused primarily by Israel’s ongoing withholding of Palestinian customs money, which it collects through its control of Palestine’s borders.
Israel has withheld an estimated four billion dollars since 2019, and Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has repeatedly pledged to cause the Palestinian Authority to “collapse economically.” This policy has increased the financial burden on the PA, forcing it to pay incomplete salaries and systematically reduce service hours since October 2023.
In public schools, this crisis is a continuation of an older one. Public school teachers have been protesting their precarious conditions for more than a decade already. In 2016, public teachers organized a massive strike across the West Bank, demanding that their salaries increase in line with the cost of living. The strike’s demands evolved to include the recognition of the teachers’ movement as an independent union. The strike reignited in 2022 and again in early 2023, each ending with agreements signed with the PA government that were never fulfilled. Many teachers who led the movement were later given early retirement or moved to remote schools, like Omar Muheisen.