The two-person Israel and Palestine team at Human Rights Watch (HRW) has resigned after the organization blocked publication of a report that deems Israel’s denial of Palestinian refugees’ right of return a “crime against humanity.”
According to The Guardian, the team consisted of Omar Shakir, who headed it for nearly the last decade, and Milena Ansari, the assistant researcher.
In their resignation letters, the team said the decision to pull the report “broke from HRW’s customary approval processes” and showed the organization was prioritizing fear of political backlash over adherence 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.”
The Guardian reported the resignations triggered internal turmoil as HRW’s new executive director, Philippe Bolopion, begins his tenure.
More than 200 HRW employees signed a protest letter sent to HRW leadership on Dec. 1, warning that blocking the report 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 also reported that some staff had raised concerns with Shakir during the process. In an Oct. 21 email, HRW’s chief advocacy officer, Bruno Stagno Ugarte, said he was concerned with the report’s wide scope, arguing it implicated all Palestinians in the diaspora. He suggested a report focusing on recent forced displacement from Gaza and the West Bank might “resonate better,” and warned that the findings “will be misread by many, our detractors first and foremost, as a call to demographically extinguish the Jewishness of the Israeli state.”
Last month, a report by the UN human rights office said that “since Oct. 7, 2023, the Government of Israel further expanded the unlawful use of force, arbitrary detention and torture, repression of civil society and undue restrictions on media freedoms, severe movement restrictions, settlement expansion and related violations in the occupied West Bank, which has marked an unprecedented deterioration of the human rights situation there,” in addition to what Gaza has witnessed in terms of “genocide,” as described by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry.
HRW, for its part, said the report “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.” The organization added that “the publication of the report was paused pending further analysis and research,” and that the process was “ongoing.”
Kenneth Roth, HRW’s executive director until 2022, defended the leadership’s decision, saying it was not political but intended to stop publication of a report that was “indefensible and would have been deeply embarrassing if given a Human Rights Watch imprimatur.”
Shakir told Jewish Currents that as public discourse has shifted in recent years, with “concepts of apartheid, genocide, and ethnic cleansing” increasingly voiced in mainstream circles, the right of return remains a third rail.
Shakir and Ansari began work on the report in January 2025 and completed a draft in August. They said it went through HRW’s usual edit process and was reviewed by eight separate departments. The report was titled “‘Our Souls Are in the Homes We Left:’ Israel’s Denial of Palestinians’ Right to Return and Crimes Against Humanity.”
The researchers concluded that denial of refugees’ right of return falls under the crime against humanity category of “other inhumane acts” under Article 7.1 (k) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
The report cited a 2018 ICC pre-trial finding that determined that preventing the return of Rohingya to Myanmar after they had been displaced to Bangladesh could be prosecuted as a crime against humanity of “other inhumane acts.”
Shakir wrote in his resignation that he had done everything possible to address colleagues’ concerns but rejected narrowing the findings to Palestinians recently displaced from the West Bank and Gaza, an approach he said Bolopion had demanded.
International law widely recognizes a refugee right to return and to receive compensation for lost property. For Palestinian refugees, a key reference is UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (1948), which says those “wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so” and calls for compensation for those who do not return.
According to UNRWA’s registry, there are more than 6.4 million Palestinian refugees, with 28.4% living in 58 official camps run by the agency: ten camps in Jordan, nine in Syria, 12 in Lebanon, 19 in the West Bank, and eight in Gaza.
The figure does not include Palestinians displaced after 1949 until the eve of the June 1967 war, and does not include Palestinians who left or were deported in 1967 as a result of the war and who were not refugees originally.
