Human Rights Watch researcher quits over halted Israel report
Palestinians who were injured in Israeli strikes on displacement tents in Khan Yunis, react after they arrive at the Nasser hospital in the southern Gaza Strip. Photo: AFP
A senior researcher at Human Rights Watch has resigned after the organisation halted publication of an internal report that said Israel’s long-standing denial of Palestinian refugees’ right of return amounts to a crime against humanity, according to Drop Site News.
Omar Shakir, who led Human Rights Watch’s Israel-Palestine work, stepped down in protest, saying he had “lost faith” in senior leadership’s commitment to the group’s established research and review standards.
Drop Site News reported that the draft was a 43-page report that went through months of internal review and legal sign-off before incoming executive director Philippe Bolopion stopped its release about two weeks before its scheduled publication on December 4. Shakir was informed of the decision during a phone call.
The report was based on interviews with 53 Palestinian refugees and fieldwork in refugee camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. It sought to link historic expulsions dating back to 1948 with more recent displacement. Shakir had hoped the report would open “a path to justice for Palestinian refugees.”
Human Rights Watch said it paused publication because it believed “aspects of the research and the factual basis for our legal conclusions needed to be strengthened,” adding that further analysis was underway. According to Drop Site News, Shakir said in his resignation email that a senior leader told him the report would be seen as a call to “demographically extinguish the Jewishness of the Israeli state.”
Also read: HRW accuses Israel of 'war crime'
The decision has triggered an internal dispute within the organisation. Reports cited by Drop Site News said staff complained that leadership bypassed normal processes. Milena Ansari, a Palestinian assistant researcher and the only other member of the Israel and Palestine team at Human Rights Watch, also resigned.
“I’ve given every bit of myself to the work for a decade. I’ve defended the work in very, very difficult circumstances,” Shakir told Drop Site News. “I have lost faith in our senior leadership’s fidelity to the core way that we do our work, to the integrity of our work, at least in the context of Israel, Palestine.”
“The refugees I interviewed deserve to know why their stories aren’t being told,” he said.
According to internal emails seen by Drop Site News, Bolopion was ultimately persuaded by other senior leaders, including Bill Frelick, director of the Refugees and Migrant division, that the report should not be published, despite completing internal review and having the backing of most of the organisation.
Drop Site News reported that on January 20, five days after the resignations, the Middle East and North Africa division held an all-staff meeting to discuss the issue, attended by more than 300 staff members.
“Our work in the MENA region will be severely undermined when and if this crisis goes public,” one chat message seen by Drop Site News said. “No one will be able to defend the organisation.”
Bolopion later held a “town hall” meeting to address the decision. Staff were given about 10 minutes at the end to ask questions or comment, and the chat function was disabled. Bolopion was reported to have told staff that the “pipeline is not sacred” as leadership weighed concerns over whether the legal argument was sufficiently supported.
The move drew comment from former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth, who defended the pause and described the report’s legal approach as “novel & unsupported” in a post on X.
The new @HRW director was right to suspend a report using a novel & unsupported legal theory to contend that denying the right to return to a locale is a crime against humanity. It had been rushed through the review process during a leadership transition. https://t.co/67FgNkBLqK
“Reports which identify serious crimes or involve novel legal analysis require strong support and internal alignment before publication. That was not the case with this report,” Bolopion wrote in a January email to staff after the town hall.
Human Rights Watch has previously said it supports the principle of a right of return for displaced people, including in the Middle East. The current dispute centres on whether Israel’s denial of that right meets the legal threshold for a crime against humanity.
Also read: How the law still enables Palestinian dispossession
Bolopion said the concern was not whether Palestinians have a right to return, which he said is HRW policy, but whether denial of that right for 1948 and 1967 refugees amounts to a crime against humanity. He added that HRW would hire the law firm Jenner & Block to conduct a review.
An HRW staff member, speaking anonymously to Drop Site News for fear of retaliation, said blocking the report marked a “watershed moment” for the organisation.
“It’s not just that the report was pulled, it’s that nobody could get a clear answer why, for months,” the staffer said. “Maybe the leadership feared repercussions and think they spiked this report for the good of the organisation.”
Another staff member said the decision had demoralised staff, citing what they described as years of decline at the organisation. “This is coming after seven years of decay at HRW,” the staffer said, referring to leadership changes, layoffs and increased bureaucracy. “Staff input is sidelined or actively put out.”
Drop Site News also quoted former Human Rights Watch MENA director Sarah Leah Whitson as saying the organisation was again confronting its systemic “Israel Exception” policy, under which work critical of Israel faces exceptional scrutiny.
“The internal struggles necessary to produce it have been uniquely punishing and uniquely painful to the staff involved,” she said.