How Human Rights Watch Killed a Report Calling Israel’s Denial of Palestinians’ Right of Return a Crime Against Humanity
The Israel-Palestine director at Human Rights Watch resigned over the decision to spike the report, which had been approved by HRW’s legal team.
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The Israel-Palestine director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), Omar Shakir, resigned effective on Monday after over almost a decade at the organization in protest of a top-level decision to shelve a report that characterized Israel’s decades-long campaign to deny Palestinians the right of return to their homes and land a “crime against humanity.”
The 43-page report formally underwent every step in Human Rights Watch’s internal review process, including evaluations by the divisions covering refugees, international justice, women and children’s rights, and the legal team over seven months. After that process was completed, incoming Executive Director Philippe Bolopion halted the report roughly two weeks before its scheduled publication on December 4. Shakir was informed of the decision by a phone call.
The report, which cites interviews with 53 Palestinian refugees and included fieldwork in refugee camps across Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, connected the expulsions of 1948 all the way to the present moment with the emptying of the camps in Gaza and the West Bank over the past two years. Shakir hoped that the report would open “a path to justice for Palestinian refugees.”
Bolopion’s decision came after a senior official at HRW raised concerns about the publication of the report. Shakir said in his resignation email that one senior leader told him it would be perceived as a call to “demographically extinguish the Jewishness of the Israeli state.”
“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. “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.” Milena Ansari, a Palestinian assistant researcher and the only other member of HRW’s Israel and Palestine team also resigned.
“The refugees I interviewed deserve to know why their stories aren’t being told,” Shakir said.
In response to an inquiry from Drop Site, HRW said in a written statement: “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.”
“Strategic issues”
In late November, Shakir, along with a MENA deputy director and a legal reviewer, initially briefed Bolopion on the outgoing report. In the call, senior leadership lobbied to delay the report.
According to internal emails obtained by Drop Site, Bolopion was ultimately swayed by other top leadership that the report shouldn’t go out, despite completing the internal review process and the backing of the majority of the organization.
Among those opposing the report was the director of the Refugees and Migrant division, Bill Frelick. Donors, journalists, and external figures had already been informed of the report’s planned publication on December 4. Frelick’s own department had signed off on the report in the formal review process. But on November 25, Frelick went outside the formal review process to voice concerns directly to Bolopion in an email.
Drop Site obtained the original email Frelick sent Bolopion, flagging “substantive legal and strategic issues.”
“To be clear, I am not objecting to our position that the Right of Return (RoR) is, indeed, a human right and that denying the right of return is a human rights violation,” Frelick wrote to Bolopion, which staff told Drop Site is the email that started the chain of events that led to the report’s shelving. “I do not think, however, that we have strong grounds for asserting that the denial of this right is a Crime Against Humanity (CAH).”
Frelick also wrote: “I also question the strategic value of HRW advocating in 2025 for Palestinian refugees and their descendants to reclaim homes in present-day Israel that were lost in 1948.”
Frelick laid out legal questions that he claimed the report did not sufficiently answer, including whether Israel intended to cause harm by denying Palestinians the right to return. “Per the requirement of “intentionally” causing great suffering, is Israel’s intent in denying return to cause great suffering or it is rather motivated by Israel’s national security concerns, demographic engineering, or other motivations, and, therefore, whatever suffering it causes would be incidental or consequential to these purposes but not their intent?” Frelick wrote.
The legal rationale for calling the denial of the right to return a crime against humanity is one that, Shakir told Drop Site, HRW has used in the past for reports in other countries, including as recently as 2023, in a report on the forced displacement of the Chagossians from their homes in the Chagos Archipelago over 60 years ago by the U.S. and the United Kingdom.
In the email, Frelick questioned essential aspects of Palestinians’ suffering. “Does the suffering (and claims) of descendants of refugees who lost their homes in 1948 weaken over time? How does HRW assess whether descendants of refugees from 1948 have maintained ties that keep their claims viable? Does having citizenship in another country have impact on those claims? Are these claims unique to the descendants of Palestinian refugees or do they apply to the descendants of all refugees from all places throughout history?” Frelick wrote.
Shakir said it’s normal for staff at HRW to disagree with the legal rationale of a report and that ultimately, HRW’s legal team makes the call on whether the argument of a report stands.
In the case of this report, two legal reviewers signed off on the report in the initial rounds of review. One of them, Jim Ross, wrote a memo after the report was spiked titled, “Strengthening the factual presentation of the R2R/CAH report.” In the memo, which was obtained by Drop Site, Ross seemed to try and strike a middle ground by saying the report needed to include more examples of the suffering of Palestinian refugees in order to bolster its legal conclusions.
“We want to be able to show very compelling cases of great suffering or serious physical/mental injury. This likely will be strongest when people are living in extreme poverty or similar awful conditions or are clearly experiencing severe mental harm as a result of being denied the right to return,” Ross wrote. “Besides just listing the harms many are facing, how can we link that as a criminal matter to their not being allowed to return to their familial home areas? … Israel is denying all of them their right to return, but the report should show convincingly that for some Israel is causing ‘great suffering’ as CAH.”
In the memo, Ross also said Tom Porteous, who was at the time chief of programs at HRW, “didn’t think it was sufficient to just hear from the refugees.” “Beyond the legal standards,” he continued, “we need [to] make a compelling case for skeptical readers. Maybe this means focusing our CAH claims on certain kinds of cases, such as on people in camps or in similar conditions where the visual, story evidence is most clear.”
Shakir and Milena Ansari, who contributed major research to the report, submitted their resignations on January 15. “Throughout my tenure, the review process ensured we published the facts as we documented them and the findings that derived from our principled and consistent application of the law,” Shakir wrote in the email sent to Middle East and North Africa (MENA) leadership and human resources. “I can no longer say that.”
Institutional crisis
When the report was spiked, researchers on various parts of the organization attempted to revive the report’s publication. “Our review processes, as well as our culture of transparency, have until now ensured that our findings are based on a principled and consistent application of the law. The executive director’s circumvention of the review process throws into question the integrity of our research, which is the foundation of our organization,” read one internal email.
But senior leadership rejected the push. The only way they would allow it to move forward, they indicated to staffers, was by limiting the findings to Palestinians displaced since 2023 within the Occupied Palestinian Territory, excluding Palestinian refugees from 1948 and 1967 now in other countries denied their right of return to their homes in what is now Israel.
Around 200 staff members signed a separate letter, some anonymously, in protest of the decision on December 1.
On January 20, five days after Shakir’s and Ansari’s resignations, the MENA division, where Shakir worked, held an all-staff meeting to discuss the decision. Over 300 staff members were on the call, expressing anger about leadership bypassing their normal process. “We are losing the organization we love and are so passionate about,” read one message sent in the collective chat.
“Our work in the MENA region will be severely undermined when and if this crisis goes public,” another read. “Not me and no one will be able to defend the organization.”
Two days later, Bolopion held a “town hall” to discuss the decision, though staffers were only given around 10 minutes at the end of the call to ask questions or make comments. The chat option was deactivated.
“The pipeline is not sacred,” Bolopion told staff in the meeting, referring to HRW’s internal review process.
Bolopion, who took the helm at HRW in November, said he did not want to start out his tenure with a situation like this. “My personal opinion was that I had concern with this legal finding, but I rely on the advice of the more senior people on the team and those who have the legal expertise to make that determination,” he said, according to a recording obtained by Drop Site. “There were disagreements if the facts supported the conclusions in a way that was rigorous enough.”
Bolopion clarified for the staff that the concern was not that Palestinians have a right to return, which is HRW policy, but whether or not the denial of the right of return amounted to a crime against humanity for 1948 and 1967 refugees. “I’m not a lawyer, but that’s what the talk of the disagreements was,” he said.
He said he didn’t feel “a sense of urgency” in publishing the report. “There was no immediate advocacy hook, so the benefits of waiting for me outweighed by far the risk of putting the report out,” he said.
Bolopion subsequently announced that HRW would hire a law firm, Jenner & Block, to carry out a review of their processes.
“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 the January email to staff following the town hall.
A troublesome precedent
A staffer at HRW—who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retribution and who has been at HRW for over a decade—said that the blocking of this report marks a “watershed moment” for the organization and sets a troublesome precedent.
“It’s not just that the report was pulled, it’s that nobody could get a clear answer why, for months,” they said, requesting anonymity for fear of reprisal in the workplace. “Maybe the leadership feared repercussions and think they spiked this report for the good of the organization.”
Screenshots of questions asked in the Q&A section of the town hall.
Another staffer, also granted anonymity, said the halt of the report has been demoralizing to staff. “This is coming after seven years of decay at HRW,” referring to changes in leadership, mass layoffs, and an overall increase in bureaucracy in the organization. “Staff input is sidelined or actively put out,” the staffer said.
Ken Roth, the former executive director of the organization, came out in defense of Bolopion on Tuesday, saying Bolopion was right to block the report. “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,” Roth posted on X. “It had been rushed through the review process during a leadership transition.”
Shakir held a virtual farewell call attended by over 130 people on Monday. HRW’s former MENA Director Sarah Leah Whitson hired Shakir in 2016 and was his supervisor until she left the organization in 2020. She is now the Executive Director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN).
“We have once again run into Human Rights Watch’s systemic ‘Israel Exception,’ with work critical of Israel subjected to exceptional review and arbitrary processes that no other country work faces,” Whitson told Drop Site. “The internal struggles necessary to produce it have been uniquely punishing and uniquely painful to the staff involved.”
“Israel/Palestine has been the litmus test for every major institution,” Shakir wrote in his final email at HRW. “And there’s a thing about ‘Palestine exceptionalism’—it often opens the door to other unprincipled compromises.”
Under Roth's tenure, HRW was always being criticized for its "subjectivity" re: the zionist entity. It seems nothing has changed and this current expose, shows the depths of the zionist infiltration, of HRW.
Time for HRW to go out of business. HRW is clearly anti-humanitarian!