A Philadelphia public school teacher and prominent pro-Palestinian activist has publicly admitted she spent years lying about her race and ethnicity, claiming Palestinian and Tunisian heritage and portraying herself as a mixed-race, Black woman while actually being a white woman from an Israeli settler family.
Hannah Gann confessed to the deception in an apology posted to Instagram after members of two Philadelphia activist organizations, the Racial Justice Organizing Committee and Philly Educators for Palestine, confronted her about inconsistencies in her background.
“I lied about my identity and have been lying for years. I have no Palestinian or Tunisian heritage,” Gann wrote. “I am a white woman of significant privilege and wealth. Anyone who supported me was manipulated and should not be judged as a result of their support for me.”
According to the two groups, Gann met with members on Thursday and, after roughly an hour of questioning, admitted the truth about her identity.
“We asked her to publicly acknowledge that she is a white woman of Jewish heritage and an Israeli settler family,” the organizations said, describing themselves as “stunned, saddened and angered by this betrayal.”
Gann had been a fixture in Philadelphia’s left-wing activist scene, presenting herself publicly as having Black and Palestinian heritage. She was listed in materials for a 2024 West Philadelphia “teach-in” on what organizers called “scholasticide” in Gaza as a Palestinian-American.
A video Gann posted in December 2025, in which she wears a keffiyeh, shows her speaking with what appears to be a noticeably different accent than the one heard in the video she posted this week as part of her public apology.
Gann said the fabrication extended even into her personal life, telling followers she concealed both her true background and her activism from her own family in order to sustain the false identity.
“I hid the truth or outright lied about my background to everyone in my life,” she wrote, saying the deception included relatives close to her.
She said she let “half-truths and obfuscations grow into outright lies” because she “genuinely wanted to commit to the work” she was doing.
The case has drawn comparisons to Rachel Dolezal, the former NAACP chapter president who was exposed in 2015 as a white woman who had spent years presenting herself publicly as Black. Community members have since taken to calling Gann the “Palestinian Rachel Dolezal.”
