The charity's founder and CEO is Dr. David Hasan, a neurosurgeon born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents who now teaches at Duke University medical school in Durham, North Carolina.
Under the plans outlined by Hasan in various communications, recordings of classroom conversations will be analyzed by an AI-powered system to detect “antisemitic,” “inciting" or “hateful” language.
If problematic language is detected, a warning will be sent to Hasan, who can then contact the teacher to understand the context and provide feedback, Hasan said in the September webinar. He said recordings are stored for 72 hours.
He conceived the idea for the charity after volunteering at hospitals in Gaza during the war and wanting to end generations of violence between Palestinians and Israelis. Hasan says he was taught at an early age to look unfavorably upon Jews and Israelis, and that it wasn’t until he attended college in the U.S. that he learned other perspectives; he wants kids in Gaza to gain these perspectives early in life.
The charity has raised money largely from individual donors, including American Jews, and says it's partnering with North American, Israeli and European aid organizations and hospitals. Its schools, called Academies of Hope, provide meals and medical and psychological care. The first school opened last summer.
The schools' lessons are mostly built around the Palestinian Authority curriculum, but language that he says glorified violence or encouraged anti-Israel or antisemitic beliefs was removed, Hasan has said.
Hasan declined to comment for this story or provide examples of curriculum changes. But a 2026 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office that examined “problematic textbook content” flagged by the U.N. in Gaza identified the kinds of issues that Israel has long complained about: the use of “the number of martyrs” to teach a mathematical concept, a reference to “Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine,” and a description of a boy shot while demonstrating in support of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
On a webinar last month with humanitarian groups, Hasan said the reason to monitor classrooms is to help train teachers in how to uphold a curriculum that he had previously said was aimed at “de-radicalization.”
“I know it’s controversial, but trust me, it’s the only way we feel for us to survive and deliver this curriculum,” Hasan said.
