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Human Rights Watch Israel-Palestine Team Quits Over Blocked Report on Right of Return
“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,” said resigning staffer Omar Shakir.
Feb 03, 2026
Two Human Rights Watch employees—the group's entire Israel-Palestine team—resigned after senior staffers blocked a report calling Israel's denial of Palestinian refugees' right of return to their homeland a crime against humanity.
Jewish Currents' Alex Kane reported Tuesday that HRW Israel-Palestine team lead Omar Shakir and assistant researcher Milena Ansari are stepping down over leadership's decision to nix the report, which was scheduled for release on December 4. Shakir wrote in his resignation email that one senior HRW leader informed him that calling Israel's denial of Palestinian right of return would be seen as a call to “demographically extinguish the Jewishness of the Israeli state.”
“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 member of Jewish Currents' advisory board—wrote in his resignation letter. “As such, I am no longer able to represent or work for Human Rights Watch.”
In an interview published Tuesday by Drop Site News, Shakir—who was deported from Israel in 2019 over his advocacy of Palestinian rights—said: “I’ve given every bit of myself to the work for a decade. I’ve defended the work in very, very difficult circumstances... The refugees I interviewed deserve to know why their stories aren’t being told."
Ansari said that "whatever justification" HRW leadership "had for pausing the report is not based on the law or facts."
The resignations underscored tensions among HRW staffers over how to navigate a potential political minefield while conducting legal analysis and reporting of Israeli policies and practices in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories.
As Kane reported:
The resignations have roiled one of the most prominent human rights groups in the world just as HRW’s new executive director, Philippe Bolopion, begins his tenure. In a statement, HRW said that 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.” They said that “the publication of the report was paused pending further analysis and research,” and that the process was “ongoing.”
Kenneth Roth, a longtime former HRW executive director, defended the group's decision to block the report, asserting on social media that Bolopion "was right to suspend a report using a novel and unsupported legal theory to contend that denying the right to return to a locale is a crime against humanity."
However, Shakir countered that HRW "found in 2023 denial of a return to amount to a crime against humanity in Chagos."
"This is based on [International Criminal Court] precedent," he added. "Other reports echoed the analysis. Are you calling on HRW to retract a report for its first time ever, or it just different rules for Palestine?"
Polis Project founder Suchitra Vijayan said on X Tuesday that "the decision by Human Rights Watch’s leadership to pull a report on the right of return for Palestinian refugees, after it had cleared internal review, legal sign-off, and publication preparation, demands public reckoning."
"This was not a draft in dispute and the explanation offered so far evades the central issue of 'institutional independence' in the face of political pressure," added Vijayan, who is also a professor at Columbia and New York universities. "Why was the report stopped, and what does this decision signals for the future of its work and credibility on Palestine?"
Offering "solidarity to Omar and Milena" on social media, Medical Aid for Palestinians director of advocacy and campaigns Rohan Talbot said that "Palestinian rights are yet again exceptionalized, their suffering trivialized, and their pursuit of justice forestalled by people who care more about reputation and expediency than law and justice."
Sarah Leah Whitson, HRW's former Middle East and North Africa director and currently executive director at Democracy for the Arab World Now, told Drop Site News on Tuesday that “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."
The modern state of Israel was established in 1948 largely through a more than decadelong campaign of terrorism against both the British occupiers of Palestine and Palestinian Arabs and the ethnic cleansing of the latter. More than 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homeland, sometimes via massacres or the threat thereof, in what Arabs call the Nakba, or catastrophe.
More than 400 Palestinian villages were destroyed or abandoned, and their denizens—some of whom still hold the keys to their stolen homes—have yet to return. Today, they and their descendants number more than 7 million, all of whom have been denied the right of return affirmed in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194.
Many Palestinians and experts around the world argue that the Nakba never ended—a position that has gained attention over the past 28 months, as Israel has faced mounting allegations of genocide for a war that's left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing in the coastal strip and around 2 million people forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened.
Bolopion told Kane Tuesday that the controversy over the blocked report is “a genuine and good-faith disagreement among colleagues on complex legal and advocacy questions."
“HRW remains committed to the right of return for all Palestinians, as has been our policy for many years," he added.
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The World Must Act Now to Abort the Next Phase of Extermination in Gaza
Another Israeli genocide is not a distant threat; it is an encroaching reality that will be finalized unless it is stopped.
Dec 31, 2025
Suppose we accept the fiction that none of us expected Israel to launch a full-scale genocide in Gaza—a premeditated campaign to erase the Strip and exterminate a significant portion of its inhabitants. Let us pretend that nearly 80 years of relentless massacres were not a prelude to this moment, and that Israel had never before sought the physical destruction of the Palestinian people as outlined by the 1948 Genocide Convention.
If we go so far as to accept the sterile, ahistoric claim that the Nakba of 1948 was "merely" ethnic cleansing rather than genocide—ignoring the mass graves and the forced erasure of a civilization—we are still left with a terrifying reality. Having witnessed the unmasked extermination that began on October 7, 2023, who can dare to argue that its perpetrators lack the intent to repeat it?
The question itself is an act of charity, as it assumes the genocide has actually stopped. In reality, the carnage has merely shifted tactics. Since the implementation of the fragile ceasefire on October 10, Israel has killed over 400 Palestinians and wounded hundreds more. Others have perished in the frozen mud of their tents. They include infants like 8-month-old Fahar Abu Jazar, who, like others, froze to death. These are not mere tragedies; they are the inevitable results of a calculated Israeli policy of destruction targeting the most vulnerable.
During this two-year campaign of extermination, more than 20,000 Palestinian children were murdered, accounting for a staggering 30% of the total victims. This blood-soaked tally ignores the thousands of souls entrapped beneath the concrete wasteland of Gaza, and those currently being consumed by the silent killers of famine and engineered epidemics.
In the dominant Western narrative, the Palestinian is the eternal aggressor. They are the occupied, the besieged, the dispossessed, and the stateless; yet they are expected to die quietly in the world's "largest open-air prison."
The horrifying statistics aside, we bear witness to the final agonies of a people. We have watched their extermination in real time, broadcast to every handheld screen on Earth. No one can claim ignorance; no one can claim innocence. Even now, we watch as 1.3 million Palestinians endure a precarious existence in tents ravaged by winter floods. We share the screams of mothers, the hollowed-out faces of broken fathers, and the haunted stares of children, and yet, the world’s political and moral institutions remain paralyzed.
If Israel resumes the full, unrestrained intensity of this genocide, will we stop it? I fear the answer is no, because the world refuses to dismantle the circumstances that permitted this slaughter in the first place. Israeli officials never bothered to hide their intent. The systematic dehumanization of Palestinians was a primary export of Israeli media, even as Western corporate outlets worked tirelessly to sanitize this criminal discourse.
The record of intent is undeniable. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir openly championed the "encouragement of migration" and demanded that "not an ounce of humanitarian aid" reach Gaza. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich argued that the starvation of 2 million people could be "just and moral" in the pursuit of military aims. From the halls of the Knesset to the pop charts, the refrain was the same: "Erase Gaza," "Leave no one there." When military leaders refer to an entire population as "human animals," they are not using metaphors; they are issuing a license for extermination.
This was preceded by the hermetic siege—a decades-long experiment in human misery that began in 2006. Despite every Palestinian plea for the world to break this death grip, the blockade was allowed to persist. This was followed by successive wars targeting a besieged, impoverished population under the banner of "security," always shielded by the Western mantra of Israel’s "right to defend itself."
In the dominant Western narrative, the Palestinian is the eternal aggressor. They are the occupied, the besieged, the dispossessed, and the stateless; yet they are expected to die quietly in the world's "largest open-air prison." Whether they utilized armed resistance, threw rocks at tanks, or marched unarmed toward snipers, they were branded "terrorists" and "militants" whose very existence was framed as a threat to their occupier.
Years before the first bomb of this genocide fell, the United Nations declared Gaza "uninhabitable." Its water was a toxin, its land a graveyard, and its people were dying of curable diseases. Yet, aside from the typical ritual of humanitarian reports, the international community did nothing to offer a political horizon, a just peace.
This criminal neglect provided the vacuum for the events of October 7, allowing Israel to weaponize its victimhood to execute a genocide of sadistic proportions. Former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant explicitly stripped Palestinians of their humanity, launching a collective slaughter directed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The stage is being set for the next phase of extermination. The siege is now absolute, the violence more concentrated, and the dehumanization of Palestinians more widespread than ever. As the international media drifts toward other distractions, Israel’s image is being rehabilitated as if the genocide never happened.
Tragically, the conditions that fueled the first wave of genocide are being meticulously reconstructed. Indeed, another Israeli genocide is not a distant threat; it is an encroaching reality that will be finalized unless it is stopped.
The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was a legal vow to "liberate mankind from such an odious scourge." If those words possess a shred of integrity, the world must act now to abort the next phase of extermination. This requires absolute accountability and a political process that finally severs the grip of Israeli colonialism and violence. The clock is ticking, and our collective voice—or our silence—will make the difference.
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Israel's Colonial Aims Are the Main Barrier to Lasting Peace
What if Gaza agrees to surrender its weapons? Will Israel leave the Palestinians alone? Will the prospects of a just peace and Palestinian freedom increase exponentially?
Dec 14, 2025
US President Donald Trump's "Board of Peace" is reportedly set to be announced before the year's end. This news coincides with increasing reports that the US administration is serious about pushing forward the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire.
However, many critical questions remain unanswered. How can a governing council be superimposed on Gaza when Palestinians are unified in their rejection of any new form of Western mandate over their lives?
Furthermore, how can the proposed "International Stabilization Force" (ISF) operate in Gaza without total clarity regarding its mission? If the ISF ends up serving primarily as an Israeli line of defense, the entire project will collapse before it begins.
Neither Arab nor Muslim countries will seriously engage in subduing Palestinians on behalf of Israel. Any other participating force will inevitably be treated by Palestinians as an occupation force.
If Israel's genocide in Gaza is entirely motivated by the desire to crush the armed groups, then why the continued crushing of the West Bank?
The main obstacle, however, is the fact that Israel has never truly respected the first phase of the ceasefire, which began, in theory, on October 10. Since that date, Israeli forces have killed over 360 Palestinians and wounded hundreds more, while demolishing thousands of residential structures, according to satellite images verified by the BBC.
Worse, Israel has habitually bombed targets beyond the "Yellow Line," which was designated as the Palestinian area where humanitarian aid is allowed to flow and people are meant to return to some kind of normalcy, despite Gaza’s near-total destruction.
Israel is hoping to make the first phase of the agreement a permanent one. This intent is evident in the continued bombings; the prevention of lifesaving supplies and aid; and the constant, unsubstantiated accusations that Palestinians are the ones violating the ceasefire.
It is expected that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will make the disarmament of Gaza the main sticking point, knowing in advance that Gaza will not surrender its weapons. He has made this clear and repeatedly so, including on November 15, when he stated that “Hamas will be disarmed—either the easy way or the hard way.”
But what if Gaza agrees to surrender its weapons? Will Israel leave the Palestinians alone? Will the prospects of a just peace and Palestinian freedom increase exponentially? To address this question, let's delve very quickly into three experiences, two from history.
Palestinian and even some Israeli historians have argued that, during the ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine, the Nakba, Israel had the intention of depopulating the country regardless of whether Palestinians resisted or not.
The implementation of Plan Dalet, the operation aimed at expelling the Palestinian population, was in no way related to the method or intensity of Palestinian resistance to Zionist militia violence.
In fact, the framework of that expulsion was predicated on the use of war as a pretext, as opposed to war as a response to Palestinian resistance. “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war,” wrote Zionist leader and Israel's first prime minister at the time, David Ben-Gurion.
Though some Mukhtars (village leaders) assumed that no resistance meant that they would be spared the same fate as those who resisted, they were wrong. Israeli historian Ilan Pappe writes: "Whereas the official Plan Dalet gave the villages the option to surrender, the operational orders did not exempt any village for any reason."
The same pattern was repeated throughout history. In 1982, after a US-brokered agreement to evacuate Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) forces out of Lebanon, the assumption was that their departure would keep the Israeli army from attacking Palestinian civilians.
Indeed, on August 21, 1982, PLO factions began leaving the country, leaving the camps undefended and their Lebanese allies vulnerable. However, Israeli violence in West Beirut had grown, not subsided, leading in September 1982 to the Sabra and Shatila massacre, which killed up to 3,500 Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians.
All the promises by Washington, the supposed "guarantees," and the diplomatic language of US envoy Philip Habib, who acted as the president's special envoy, meant absolutely nothing, as Israel helped facilitate one of history's most brutal massacres.
And, of course, there is the ongoing saga of the West Bank itself, which, unlike Gaza, lacks armed resistance infrastructure and is administered by the Palestinian Authority (PA), which operates based on an Israeli-US-Western mandate.
Yet, even before the Gaza genocide, the West Bank's suffering had grown, its land confiscated, entire communities ethnically cleansed, whole refugee camps destroyed, and hundreds of residents killed.
Between October 7, 2023, and late 2025, United Nations and human rights reports indicate that Israeli forces and settlers killed over 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem (more than 200 children). Thousands more were injured, and Israeli authorities destroyed or confiscated thousands of Palestinian-owned structures, displacing many. Additionally, an estimated 10,000 Palestinians from the West Bank were arrested between October 2023 and August 2024.
If Israel's genocide in Gaza is entirely motivated by the desire to crush the armed groups, then why the continued crushing of the West Bank?
Those who continue to entertain the Israeli narrative regarding Gaza must confront this historical record and acknowledge two crucial, enduring realities. First, Israel's violence is fundamentally driven by its settler-colonial ambitions, not merely by Palestinian resistance. Second, Palestinian resistance is a deeply rooted historical imperative—the native population's determined struggle for self-liberation from foreign occupation.
Only by abandoning the reductionist language that frames Israeli wars as simple responses to armed groups can we arrive at a profound understanding of events in Palestine, Israel's true motives, and the legitimacy of the Palestinian struggle.
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