Islamist group campaigns against Christian West Bank school over hijab restriction on deaf student

A Palestinian Islamist group opposed to the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women has launched a campaign against a Catholic school for deaf and hard-of-hearing students in Bethlehem, accusing the institution of preventing a female student from wearing a hijab.

The Popular Movement to Overturn CEDAW, which campaigns against the international women’s rights convention, has recently targeted the Ephpheta Paul VI Institute over allegations that the school prevented a student from attending classes while wearing an Islamic head covering, according to posts published by the movement on social media.

The movement accused the institute of refusing a female student entry and denying her the right to attend classes while wearing what it described as “religiously prescribed clothing.”

According to the group’s social media account, the parents of a Muslim student met with the school’s principal, and it was initially agreed that the student could wear the hijab, though the decision was revoked after three days. The group subsequently alleged that she was told to remove it.

Popular Movement to Overturn CEDAW claims school is 'tampering with religion'

“They are tampering with our religion,” the movement claimed. “Sometimes, they allow the girls to wear the hijab when they come to enter the school, and sometimes they make them remove it when they want to study.”

In a subsequent post, the movement said its campaign was intended to “bring comfort to these honorable girls,” adding that it rejected “injustice from any party” and would not compromise over the hijab, which it described as connected to the Islamic faith.

The group called on the Palestinian Education Ministry to intervene over what it described as restrictions on students’ clothing and the denial of the right to education.

Some of the group’s followers, responding to the campaign, called for the school to be burned down if it accepted municipal funding, while others criticized the student for wearing jeans, arguing that they did not meet Islamic standards of modesty. Many also said her parents should transfer her to a school that better reflected their religious beliefs.

Ephpheta Paul VI Institute founded to educate hard-of-hearing children

The Ephpheta Paul VI Institute is a Catholic school in Bethlehem specializing in the education and audio-phonetic rehabilitation of deaf and hard-of-hearing children from across the Palestinian territories. The institute says it welcomes children of different religious backgrounds and describes itself as a center for coexistence and mutual tolerance.

The school was inaugurated on June 30, 1971, following a project inspired by Pope Paul VI’s 1964 visit to Israel. During the visit, the pope took note of the number of deaf children in Bethlehem who lacked access to education and expressed a desire for an institution to be established.

The institute was established through cooperation involving the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem and the Catholic Near East Welfare Association through the Pontifical Mission for Palestine. The Congregation of the Sisters Teachers of Saint Dorothy, Daughters of the Sacred Hearts, was entrusted with its management and continues to run the institute.

The movement has also turned its attention to Dr. Kifah Mansour, a law lecturer at Al-Istiqlal University, over a comment attributed to a social media account bearing her name.

The account claimed that Christian institutions had begun closing their doors to Muslims “as a result of comments and practices that did not respect the differences in dress, lifestyles, and ways of life of the Christian community.”

Mansour’s documented public record presents a different picture of her position on CEDAW. In 2022, she was quoted by Palestinian women’s rights organization MIFTAH supporting efforts to integrate CEDAW and other international human-rights conventions into the work of Al-Istiqlal University and Palestinian security institutions.

It was not immediately clear whether Mansour herself authored the social media comment attributed to her.

Neither the movement nor the school responded to The Jerusalem Post’s request for comment.