file - Human Rights Watch's Israel and Palestine director Omar Shakir, a US citizen, sits at his office in the West Bank city of Ramallah. AFP
In separate resignation letters obtained by Jewish Currents and The Guardian, Omar Shakir, who led HRW’s Israel-Palestine team for nearly a decade, and Milena Ansari, the team’s assistant researcher, said the leadership’s decision to halt the report departed from HRW’s customary approval processes and showed the organization was prioritising fear of political backlash over its commitment to international law.
“I have lost my faith in the integrity of how we do our work and our commitment to principled reporting on the facts and application of the law,” Shakir wrote in his resignation letter.
“As such, I am no longer able to represent or work for Human Rights Watch,” he added.
The unpublished 33-page report, reviewed by The Guardian and Jewish Currents, examines not only Palestinians recently displaced by Israeli military operations in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, but also long-standing Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria who were uprooted in 1948 and 1967. It details how generations of refugees have endured chronic poverty, inadequate housing, and severe restrictions on land ownership and employment.
The report’s authors concluded that Israel’s denial of Palestinian refugees’ right of return constitutes a crime against humanity under the category of “other inhumane acts”.
Shakir said his experience showed that while public discourse on Israel has shifted in recent years—with “concepts of apartheid, genocide, and ethnic cleansing” increasingly entering mainstream debate—the right of return remains a political “third rail”.
“The one topic,” he said, “even at Human Rights Watch, for which there remains an unwillingness to apply the law and the facts in a principled way, is the plight of refugees and their right to return to the homes they were forced to flee.”
According to The Guardian, the resignations have shaken one of the world’s most prominent human rights organisations just as its new executive director, Philippe Bolopion, begins his tenure.
More than 200 HRW employees signed a letter of protest sent to the organisation’s leadership on 1 December, describing HRW’s “rigorous vetting process” as the “cornerstone of our credibility”.
Blocking the report, staffers warned, could “create the perception that HRW’s review process is open to undue intervention that can reverse decisions taken through the pipeline, undermine trust in its purpose and integrity, set a precedent that work can be shelved without transparency, and raise concerns that other work could be suppressed,” The Guardian reported.
In a statement, HRW said “the report in question raised complex and consequential issues”.
“In our review process, we concluded that aspects of the research and the factual basis for our legal conclusions needed to be strengthened to meet Human Rights Watch’s high standards. For that reason, the publication of the report was paused pending further analysis and research. This process is ongoing,” it added.
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