Two Human Rights Watch (HRW) employees, who constituted the entirety of the organisation’s Israel and Palestine team, resigned after senior members blocked a report that stated Israel’s actions to deny Palestinian refugees’ right to return as a “crime against humanity.”
According to the separate resignation letters accessed by the Jewish magazine Jewish Currents, Omar Shakir, who was the head of the team for almost a decade, and Milena Ansari, the assistant researcher, said the leadership’s move to bar the report from its publication on December 4, 2025, does not represent HRW’s general approval process.
It was proof that the organisation was prioritising fear of political backlash over the truth about international law, they said in their respective letters.
“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, who is also a member of the magazine’s advisory board, wrote in his resignation letter.
“As such, I am no longer able to represent or work for Human Rights Watch,” he added.
However, the organisation’s executive director, Philippe Bolopion, who just began his tenure, said that the report raised “complex issues,” and that it needed to be “strengthened to meet Human Rights Watch’s high standards.”
Speaking to Jewish Currents, Shakir expressed his concerns about HRW taking the “finalised report back to the drawing board,” essentially giving the leadership the chance to “kill ot distort the report” at any stage.
According to Shakil, even with conversations around Palestine being widely embraced, with “concepts of apartheid, genocide, and ethnic cleansing” being talked about broadly, the Palestinians’ right of return is still a controversial topic to be discussed, since several Israeli supporters claim that it could potentially end the Jewish state by not having a Jewish majority.
“The one topic 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 that they were forced to flee,” he said.
Various concerns about the report
However, the organisation maintained that the disagreement has nothing to do with the refugees’ right to return. On January 29, Bolopian had reportedly said that the organisation issued an independent review of “what happened, and what lessons we need to learn” from the report. He instead called the events of the last two months a “genuine and good-faith disagreement among colleagues” over complex, legal questions. He stressed that HRW is committed to the right of return for all Palestinians, “as has been our policy for many years.”
Shakir and Ansari had drafted the report in August 2025 and sent it for editing, which, going with the organisation’s editing process, passes through eight separate departments. Shakir had received concerns along the way, and in an October 21, 2025, email, the chief advocacy officer, Bruno Stagno Ugarte, said he had issues about the scope of the report.
In his view, the report involved all Palestinian diaspora, so he suggested that a better report would be on the recent forced displacements from the West Bank and Gaza, which might even “resonate better.”
Additionally, he raised concerns over the report being possibly “misread by many,” adding that the critics would take it as a call to “demographically extinguish the Jewishness of the Israeli state.”
HRW’s acting program director at the time, Tom Porteous, also shared concern over reputational damage. He told Shakir that although the report was rightly argued, “the question is how we are going to deploy this argument in our advocacy without this coming off as HRW rejecting the state of Israel and without it undermining our credibility as a neutral, impartial monitor of events.”
Decision to pull the report came as surprise
Shakir recounted that ultimately when the report was pulled, he and other staff were surprised since Bolopian was involved in various roles in the organisation and was a major contributor to the group’s 2021 report, which accused Israel of committing apartheid.
Shakir said it was his responsibility to the displaced Palestinians to tell their story.
“Witnessing the anguish in the Palestinians I interviewed, who are effectively condemned to lifelong refugee status, is among the hardest things I’ve seen,” he said. “They deserve to know why their stories aren’t being told.”
Report stated denial of right of return may qualify as crimes against humanity
The unpublished 33-page report reportedly documents experiences of Palestinians not just recently displaced, but goes back well into the 1940s and 1960s when Palestinians were forced to uproot by Israeli forces.
Titled, “Our Souls Are in the Homes We Left: Israel’s Denial of Palestinians’ Right to Return and Crimes Against Humanity,” the work had begun in January 2025 and was intended as a follow-up to a November 2024 report, which centred around the internal displacement of Palestinians in Gaza.
Ansari said that during the interview for that report, refugees connected their current situation to “their generational trauma of being uprooted and disconnected from their homelands back in 1948 and back in 1967.”
The report concluded that denying refugees the right of return comes under crimes against humanity, recognised as “other inhumane acts, which under the Rome statute that also established the International Criminal Court, was meant to acknowledge similar crimes that caused ‘great suffering’ deliberately.”
Read the full report on Jewish Currents here.
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