Scouting is supposed to be about building campfires and tying knots, not grievance politics. So when a branch of The Scout Association started handing 8-year-olds a genocide-themed activity pack, we felt it needed scrutiny. 

We reviewed the evidence ourselves, and what we found raises real questions about oversight, safeguarding, and how far an affiliated youth organisation can drift from Scouting's own rules before anyone steps in. 

The Muslim Scout Fellowship (MSF) has been part of The Scout Association since 1999, running as the UK's official body for Muslim youth active in Scouting and now covering more than 70 Muslim Scout groups nationally. Its mission, in its own words, is to help young Muslims in Britain grow into confident, empowered adults. 

Last December, in partnership with the charity Islamic Relief, MSF ran a “Paint for Gaza” challenge. Most entries were predictable: the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Palestinian flags. But some of the artwork posted to MSF's Instagram showed the full territory of the State of Israel repainted in the colours of the Palestinian flag, with the phrase “From the river to the sea”. 

To be clear about the meaning of that phrase, Hamas’s former leader and mastermind of the October 7, 2023 attacks, Yahya Sinwar, invoked it himself when he described Hamas’s strategic vision as “[t]he complete liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea...” 

Appropriately, German courts, including in Düsseldorf and Berlin, have ruled the phrase can constitute a criminal offence when tied to Hamas's post-October-7 use of it, and Queensland became the first Australian jurisdiction to ban the phrase outright after the 2025 Bondi Beach massacre. 

None of that nuance made it into a Scout-affiliated art competition for children. 

We wrote to the Scout Association laying out these concerns, and the Association has since confirmed it opened a formal investigation.  

Unfortunately, the painting challenge was not an isolated example.  

MSF publishes a library of downloadable activity packs for Scout leaders, including one from 2024, “Palestine Activities: One Year On”, which goes considerably further than the painting prompt. 

That activity pack frames the war in Gaza in unambiguous terms: “atrocities, war and bombardment,” repeatedly described as “genocide”. From its opening page, the pack graphically tells Scouts that “[c]hildren in Gaza are being massacred and burned alive in their tents”, and claims that “[c]hildren in Gaza are in agony from untreated wounds, because all the hospitals have been bombed and destroyed and medical staff forcibly evacuated or killed.” 

And the suggested activities go far beyond framing. Younger Scouts are asked to build shelters and imagine themselves as displaced Gazan children. Older Scouts are told to build a “survival themed camp” “based on a particular incident or a story of one of the young children in Palestine” and then told try to live that way for a weekend. They’re also asked to make their own toiletries because “[a]fter losing their homes and all their personal belongings, making your [sic] own survival accessories to cook, eat and maintain personal hygiene is the only way to go in Gaza.” Another activity directs 10 ½ -18-year-olds to “cut out 1-2" meals a day for a week to “reflect on” hunger in Gaza, alongside instructions to limit water intake to one cup per day, sit “under a cold shelter for one hour.” 

Encouraging children to restrict food and water intake as a role-play exercise is the kind of thing that would normally trigger a safeguarding review on its own, regardless of the politically-charged content wrapped around it. 

The Scout Association’s own guidance states that Scouts is a non-political organisation and that official social-media accounts must remain politically neutral. Its guidance on global conflicts is clearer still: leaders should not direct young people towards particular opinions, but should instead provide balanced information and allow them to reach their own conclusions without adult influence. That standard does not appear to have been met here. 

We will continue to monitor the Scout Association's investigation into the Muslim Scout Fellowship.