Human Rights Watch researchers resign after report on Palestinian right of return blocked | World news

Two Human Rights Watch (HRW) staffers who make up the organization’s entire Israel and Palestine team are leaving their positions after leadership blocked a report that deemed Israel’s denial of the right of return for Palestinian refugees a “crime against humanity.”

Omar Shakir, who led the team for nearly a decade, and Milena Ansari, the team’s co-investigator, said in separate resignation letters obtained by Jewish Currents and the Guardian that the leadership’s decision to withdraw the report broke with HRW’s customary approval processes and was evidence that the organization was emphasizing fear of political backlash rather than commitment to international law.

“I have lost faith in the integrity of how we do our job and our commitment to principled reporting on the facts and the application of the law,” Shakir wrote in his resignation letter. “For this reason, I can no longer represent or work on behalf of Human Rights Watch.” The resignations have troubled one of the world’s most prominent human rights groups, as HRW’s new director general, Philippe Bolopion, took office.

In a statement, HRW said: “The report in question raised complex and consequential issues. During our review process, we concluded that some aspects of the research and the concrete basis of our legal conclusions needed to be strengthened to meet Human Rights Watch’s high standards. Therefore, publication of the report has been withheld pending further analysis and investigation. This process is ongoing.”

Shakir said his experience shows that public opinion has been shaping towards Israel over the past few years, and “the concepts of apartheid, genocide and ethnic cleansing are increasingly being voiced” in mainstream circles. He said the right of return remains a third way. “Even at Human Rights Watch, where there remains a reluctance to apply the law and the facts in a principled manner, the issue is the plight of refugees and their right to return to the homes they were forced to flee,” he said.

Israel supporters say allowing Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return home would end the Jewish state by eliminating its Jewish majority.

But the organisation’s leaders insisted in their message that the substance of the dispute had nothing to do with the right of return, which HRW supports. In a Jan. 29 email to staff, Bolopion said HRW had commissioned an independent review of “what happened and what lessons we need to learn.” Bolopion described the events of the past two months as “a genuine and good-faith disagreement between colleagues on complex legal and advocacy issues” and emphasized: “HRW remains committed to the right of return for all Palestinians, as has been our policy for many years.”

Shakir and Ansari completed the draft of their report in August 2025; Meanwhile, they said the report went through HRW’s regular editing process and was ultimately reviewed by eight separate departments. Some of our colleagues expressed their concerns to Şakir during this process. In an Oct. 21 email, chief advocacy officer Bruno Stagno Ugarte said he was concerned about the report’s broad scope, which in his view included all Palestinians in the diaspora, and suggested that a report on recent forced displacements from Gaza and the West Bank “might resonate better.” He also said he was concerned that the findings “will be misread by many, especially our critics, as a call to demographically eliminate the Jewishness of the state of Israel.”

Concerns about reputational damage were also voiced by Tom Porteous, HRW’s acting program director at the time. He wrote to Shakir that the report was well-argued, but “the question is how to use this argument in our advocacy without reaching a conclusion such as HRW’s rejection of the state of Israel and undermining our credibility as an unbiased, unbiased observer of events.”

Still, the decision to withdraw the final report came as a surprise to Şakir and other staff, who said Bolopion, who has worked in many roles at HRW, was a key contributor to the group’s landmark 2021. report He accuses Israel of committing the crime of apartheid.

‘Other inhuman acts’

Human Rights Watch called repeatedly We have featured in previous publications about the right of return, which is a universal human right based on international law. But previous reports focused on other issues and did not establish that Israel’s continued denial of refugees’ rights of return constituted a crime against humanity.

Work on the report titled ‘Our Souls Are in the Houses We Left: Israel’s Denial of Palestinians’ Right of Return and Crimes Against Humanity’ started in January 2025. November 2024 report It focused on the internal displacement of Palestinians in Gaza. In interviews for this report, Ansari said he heard refugees attribute their current situation to “the generational trauma they experienced as a result of being uprooted from their homeland and cut off from their homeland in 1948 and 1967.”

Inspired by these narratives, the unpublished 33-page report reviewed by Jewish Currents and the Guardian documents not only the experiences of Palestinians recently displaced from Gaza and the West Bank by Israeli military forces, but also the experiences of some Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, displaced by Israeli forces in 1948 and 1967, who suffered persistent poverty and substandard housing and faced serious barriers to land ownership and employment.

The authors come to a new conclusion: denying these refugees the right to return amounts to crimes against humanity, known as “other inhumane acts.” Under Rome Statute When the organization established the ICC in 1998, this definition was intended to address gross abuses that were similar to other crimes that deliberately caused “great suffering” (e.g. apartheid or extermination) but did not fit neatly into these legal categories.

The report mentions a preliminary hearing in 2018 find The ICC ruled that preventing the Rohingya from returning to Myanmar after being resettled in Bangladesh could be prosecuted as a crime against humanity within the scope of “other inhumane acts”. Shakir said the report brings a legal argument previously limited to the academic world to the world of human rights advocacy, providing an “asset” that could help a refugee displaced in 1948 build a current case against Israeli authorities.

The report’s planned publication date of 4 December 2025 coincides with the week when HRW’s new chief executive will take office, following repeated leadership changes over the past few years.

In November, senior staff began to raise the possibility of the report being delayed due to colleagues’ concerns. According to Shakir and Ansari, the conclusion that denying the right of return constitutes “other inhumane acts” that constitute crimes against humanity was weak and not established law, they felt, and required further evidence to support.

Shakir floated the possibility of resignation if the report was postponed, but also said he offered to make clear that the determination of crimes against humanity applies strictly only to the communities that are the focus of the investigation: those most vulnerable as a result of the denial of their right of return, both in the occupied territories and among a subset of Palestinians living in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.

Şakir said that these offers were rejected. Days before Bolopion took office as executive director, he called Şakir and told him that the report should be stopped.

In response, more than 200 HRW employees signed a letter of protest sent to leadership on December 1, calling the organization’s “rigorous review process” “the cornerstone of our credibility.” Blocking the report “could create the perception that HRW’s review process is susceptible to unwarranted interference that could overturn decisions made through the pipeline, undermine confidence in its purpose and integrity, set a precedent that work could be shelved without transparency, and raise concerns that other work could be hidden,” the employees wrote. HRW said in a statement: “Our internal review processes are robust and designed to protect the integrity of our findings. As with any organization conducting such analyses, differences of professional judgment may arise in the process.”

Kenneth Roth, who was HRW’s chief executive until 2022 and learned of the controversy from former colleagues, rejects claims that the decision was political and argues that the leadership transition has clouded the approval process. He described Shakir’s behavior as “an over-interpretation of the law during the leadership transition and an effort to speak quickly through the review system at a time when it was indefensible. Various staff members raised concerns about the report during the review, but Philippe had to come in as executive director…exert leadership that should have been exercised much earlier and send the report back for a more defensible interpretation.” Roth, who had not personally read the report but was aware of Shakir’s legal claim, insisted that “this is about preventing the publication of a report that is indefensible and would be deeply embarrassing with the permission of Human Rights Watch.” (Roth is a columnist for the Guardian.)

In response to doubts about the strength of his research, Şakir said that the report, press release and question-and-answer document had been “fully reviewed and finalized” and were being prepared for publication on their website. “If there were credible concerns about the research, this would never have happened at HRW, where major Israel/Palestine reports are always subject to extra scrutiny.” He added: “In an organization of 500 people, people will have different views. But you don’t need the consensus of 500 people. That’s not how we publish reports.”

In his resignation letter, Shakir argued that he had done everything he could to assuage staff concerns – “even though he knew these were not the real reasons behind our decision to withdraw the report and our alarm at the precedent it had set” – but argued that there was no point in limiting the findings to Palestinians recently displaced from the West Bank and Gaza; This is an approach that many staff say Bolopion calls for. “Such a limitation means that we say that the suffering caused by the denial of return of a Palestinian displaced for a year from a West Bank refugee camp, but not those who have been denied return for 78 years, would meet the threshold of sufficient severity to constitute a crime against humanity,” he writes.

Shakir was deported from Israel in 2019 for defending the human rights of Palestinians. He emphasized the organization’s responsibility towards displaced Palestinian victims. “Witnessing the suffering of the Palestinians I have met, who are effectively condemned to refugee status for life, is among the most difficult things I have ever seen,” he said. “They deserve to know why their stories aren’t being told.”