A Gaza charity plans to record classrooms and flag speech with an AI alert to its founder

A U.S. charity that runs schools in Gaza plans to record classroom talk and run the audio through an artificial-intelligence system that flags words it classes as antisemitic, inciting or hateful. The Associated Press reported the plan on Friday, from a webinar the charity's founder gave last month and from a text message he sent before August.

The founder and chief executive is David Hasan, a neurosurgeon born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents, who teaches at Duke University Medical School in Durham, North Carolina. He told the webinar he built the charity, Gaza Children Village, after volunteering in Gaza hospitals during the war. The schools, in central and southern Gaza, serve thousands of children, many of whom have lost parents or other relatives. Hasan said he was worried teachers might leave a curriculum the charity describes as built around peace and tolerance.

Under the design he set out, classroom recordings are analysed for the flagged language. A warning goes to him. He can then call the teacher, ask about the context, and give feedback. He said the recordings are stored for 72 hours. The technology has been tested. The plan, in the message seen by the AP, is to put it in dozens of classrooms.

The AP found no sign that the charity intends to hand the recordings to anyone else. That limit is part of the design Hasan described. It is also the point Palestinian groups, advocacy organisations and at least one partner of the charity have challenged. A file that stays inside a charity for 72 hours can still be copied, misread by the model, or demanded later by an authority the charity does not control. Gaza is three years into a war in which phones, lists and recordings have been treated as intelligence.

Hasan said the alert comes to him. It does not go to a ministry or a donor portal in the design he described. The human step is a phone call to the teacher. The machine step is the flag. The categories he named are broad. Hateful and inciting are not terms with a single legal definition in a classroom in Deir al-Balah or Khan Younis. A system that sends him a warning has to have a list, a threshold, or both. The AP account does not publish that list.

The 72-hour retention is the sharpest operational number in the plan. It is short by the standards of a school archive. It is long enough for a review. It also means a parent cannot later ask for a term's audio, because the charity says the file will be gone. Deletion on a timer cuts one risk and creates another: there is no independent recording if a teacher disputes the flag.

Israeli officials have argued for years that Palestinian textbooks and classroom speech encourage hostility. That argument is the political weather around Hasan's tool. The charity is a private American organisation. Hasan presented the monitor as a way to keep his own schools on the curriculum he funds. Partners who object are objecting to microphones in Gaza classrooms run by that organisation.

The schools' pupils are children who have already lost family. A microphone in that room records grief, rumour and ordinary lesson talk along with anything the model is built to catch. Hasan's answer, in the webinar, was context: he would ask the teacher what was meant. Context after a flag still begins with a recording. The recording comes first.

Deployment, as described before August, was still a plan plus a test. Friday's report is the point at which the plan became public, and at which partner objections became part of the record. The next verifiable step is whether dozens of classrooms actually receive the microphones, and whether the 72-hour rule is written into a contract a partner can read.

Until that contract is public, the known design is the one Hasan gave: audio in, a flag to the founder, a call to the teacher, deletion after three days. The objection on file is that this design still puts a listening system into schools for children in a war zone.