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

In separate resignation letters obtained by Jewish Currents, Omar Shakir, who has headed the team for nearly the last decade, and Milena Ansari, the team’s assistant researcher, said leadership’s decision to pull the report before its scheduled publication on December 4th broke from HRW’s customary approval processes and was evidence that the organization was putting fear of political backlash over a commitment 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,” wrote Shakir in his resignation letter. “As such, I am no longer able to represent or work for Human Rights Watch.” (Disclosure: Shakir is a member of Jewish Currents’s Advisory Board.)

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.”

In an interview with Jewish Currents, Shakir said he worried that HRW planned to “take the finalized report back to the drawing board,” giving leadership “the opportunity to kill or distort the report at different stages.” He said that despite the clear “shift in discourse when it comes to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians,” with “concepts of apartheid, genocide, and ethnic cleansing” now being broadly embraced, the right of return—which Israel’s supporters say would end the Jewish state by depriving it a Jewish majority—remains a third rail. “The one topic,” he said, “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.”

In its messaging, the organization’s leadership has insisted that the core of the disagreement has nothing to do with the right of return. In an email to staff on January 29th, Bolopion said HRW had commissioned an independent review of “what happened, and what lessons we need to learn.” Once the review is completed, he said, he would convene colleagues “to take this work forward in a way that is legally sound, aligned with our advocacy goals, and able to achieve meaningful impact.” Bolopion cast the events of the past two months as “a genuine and good-faith disagreement among colleagues on complex legal and advocacy questions,” and emphasized that “HRW remains committed to the right of return for all Palestinians, as has been our policy for many years.”

Shakir and Ansari completed a draft of their report in August 2025, at which time they say it went through HRW’s usual edit process, ultimately being reviewed by eight separate departments. Some colleagues raised concerns to Shakir along the way. In an October 21st email, chief advocacy officer Bruno Stagno Ugarte said he was concerned with the wide scope of the report, which in his view implicated all diaspora Palestinians, and he suggested that a report on the recent forced displacements from Gaza and the West Bank might “resonate better.” He further said he worried 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.” Concerns about reputational damage were also voiced by Tom Porteous, HRW’s acting program director at the time. He wrote Shakir that the report was well-argued, but “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.”

Still, the decision to pull the final report came as a surprise to Shakir and others on staff, who said Bolopion—who has worked for HRW in numerous roles—was a key contributor to the group’s landmark 2021 report accusing Israel of committing the crime of apartheid. He stressed the organization’s responsibility to Palestinian victims of displacement. “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.”

Human Rights Watch has repeatedly called for the right of return—a universal human right grounded in international law—in previous publications. But those earlier reports were focused on other issues, and did not make the case that Israel’s ongoing denial of refugees’ right to return was a crime against humanity. In addition to leadership’s concerns over challenging Israel’s Jewish demographic majority, Ansari suggested that the report may have been pulled because it makes the case for connecting the “decades-long policy of denied return” to “a crime that’s prosecutable before the International Criminal Court” (ICC), a first for HRW. She pointed to “an environment where President Trump is trying to remove the role of the International Criminal Court by imposing sanctions,” and speculated that “this might impose more backlash on Human Rights Watch.”

Work on the report, eventually titled “‘Our Souls Are in the Homes We Left:’ Israel’s Denial of Palestinians’ Right to Return and Crimes Against Humanity,” had begun in January 2025. It was intended as a follow-up to a November 2024 report that focused on the internal displacement of Palestinians in Gaza. During interviews for that report, Ansari said, she heard refugees connect their current predicament to “their generational trauma of being uprooted and disconnected from their homelands back in 1948 and back in 1967.”

Inspired by those accounts, the unpublished 33-page report, which has been reviewed by Jewish Currents, not only documents the experiences of Palestinians recently displaced by Israeli military forces from Gaza and the West Bank, but also those of some Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria who were originally displaced by Israeli forces in 1948 and 1967, and who have suffered persistent poverty and substandard housing and face severe obstacles to land ownership and employment. The authors reach a novel conclusion: The denial of these refugees’ right of return falls under the crime against humanity known as “other inhumane acts.” Under the Rome Statute that established the ICC in 1998, this designation was meant to address grave abuses that were similar in character to other crimes that intentionally caused “great suffering”—apartheid, for instance, or extermination—but did not precisely fit into those legal categories.

The report cites a 2018 pre-trial finding by the ICC that determined that preventing the return of Rohingya to Myanmar after they’d been displaced to Bangladesh could be prosecuted as a crime against humanity of “other inhumane acts.” Shakir said that by drawing on that finding and applying it to Palestinian refugees, the report introduced a legal argument that had been previously confined to academia into the world of human-rights advocacy, providing an “asset” that could potentially help a refugee displaced in 1948 bring a current case against Israeli authorities.

The report’s slated publication date of December 4th coincided with the week HRW’s new executive director would begin his tenure, which follows repeated leadership changes over the last few years. During a November 20th meeting meant to brief Bolopion on the findings, acting program director Porteous and advocacy head Stagno stepped in, according to Shakir and Ansari. Porteous said he thought Bolopion should be aware that colleagues had raised “concerns” about the report and had asked for it to be delayed, a move he supported. That request was echoed by acting executive director Federico Borello, whom Shakir said had previously been supportive of the report. At the meeting, Shakir raised the prospect of resignation if the report was delayed. Five days later, Bolopion called Shakir to tell him that he was putting the report on “pause” because of senior staff members’ concerns.

In response, over 200 employees signed a letter of protest, sent to leadership on December 1st, calling the organization’s “rigorous vetting process” the “cornerstone of our credibility.” Delaying the report, the staffers wrote, 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.” In their statement, HRW said that “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 can arise in the process.”

Kenneth Roth, who was HRW’s executive director until 2022 and learned about the controversy from his former colleagues, rejects allegations the decision was political and argues that the leadership transition marred the approval process. He characterized Shakir’s behavior as an effort “to fast-talk through the review system at a time of leadership transition an extreme interpretation of the law that was indefensible. Various staff members expressed concern with the report during the review, but it took Philippe arriving as executive director . . . to exert the leadership that should have been exercised far earlier and to send the report back for a more defensible interpretation.” Roth—who has not read the report personally but who was briefed on the legal argument by Shakir—insisted that “this had to do with preventing publication of a report that was indefensible and would have been deeply embarrassing if given a Human Rights Watch imprimatur.”

In response to doubts over the strength of his research, Shakir said that the report, its press release, and its question and answer document were “fully reviewed and finalized” and prepared for publication on their website. “Were there any credible concerns about the research, this would never have happened at HRW, where major Israel/Palestine reports always attract extra scrutiny.” He added: “In an organization of 500 people, people are gonna have different views. But you do not need a consensus of 500 people. That’s not how we release reports.”

According to Shakir and Ansari, members of HRW’s legal department pushed back on leadership’s feeling that the report’s conclusion—that denying the right of return constitutes the crime against humanity of “other inhumane acts”—was weak and not established law at a December 3rd meeting, arguing that the analysis was correct and pointing out that HRW had cited this interpretation of the law in a previous report on the Chagos Islands. After the meeting, Shakir offered to revise the legal section of the report, a proposal that included, among other items, adding additional evidence about the mental-health impacts of denial of return on Palestinian refugees, which helps determine whether abuse can be deemed a crime against humanity. In response to concerns over the report’s scope, Shakir offered to clarify that the crimes against humanity determination definitively applied only to the communities that were the focus of the research: those most acutely vulnerable as a result of the denial of their right to return, both in the occupied territories and in Syria, Lebanon, and among a subset of Palestinians living in Jordan. But according to Shakir, senior leadership rejected that approach on January 14th, saying it did not address Stagno’s concerns. “These are red alarms showing that whatever justification they had for pausing the report is not based on the law or facts,” said Ansari.

According to Shakir, HRW leaders said they would only move forward with the report if it focused solely on those displaced from the West Bank and Gaza since 2023. This was echoed at a January 22nd meeting with HRW staff—during which the chat feature was disabled—with Bolopion saying that “pragmatism dictated narrowing the scope of the findings,” according to multiple sources.

In his resignation letter, Shakir argued that it made no sense to limit the findings to Palestinians recently displaced from the West Bank and Gaza, an approach multiple staffers say Bolopian demanded. “Such a limitation means we would be saying that the suffering caused by the denial of return for a Palestinian displaced for a year from a West Bank refugee camp would meet the threshold of sufficient gravity to be a crime against humanity, but not those denied return for 78 years,” he writes. “This again lays bare” that the “decision not to publish the report is not (and never was) about purported concerns about the strength of the legal findings,” he added, “but rather an unprincipled and cowardly effort to recast our findings to avoid . . . blowback.”

The blocking of the report will likely have consequences that reverberate beyond HRW. Palestinian civil society groups will be re-examining their relationships with the human rights organization, said Ubai Aboudi, a steering committee member for the Palestinian NGOs Network. He noted that in the aftermath of HRW’s 2024 report that accused Palestinian militant groups of war crimes and crimes against humanity during the October 7th attacks, a number of Palestinian groups, including the Boycott National Committee, called on Palestinians and their allies to consider boycotting the group. At that point, Aboudi said, “Palestinian civil society organizations and human rights organizations did not participate because we believed that Human Rights Watch had integrity.” Now, he said, “Human Rights Watch and its reports are called into question if political considerations are a part of releasing any new reports.”

Bolopion’s move comes at a moment when strong advocacy from HRW is needed, Shakir said, especially amid Israel’s destruction of refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank, and while Israel attempts to shut downUNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees. “We have a US government that is upending the rules-based international order. We’re in the ashes of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza and the destruction of the foundations of international military law that grew out of the ashes of World War Two,” said Shakir. “The world needs a strong Human Rights Watch.” But Shakir—who was deported from Israel in 2019 because of his advocacy for Palestinian human rights—now says he questions whether the organization can be true to its mandate. “The job has involved attacks and pressure campaigns. But what kept me in the organization for so long was its absolute commitment to the facts and the law,” he told Jewish Currents. “The way our new leadership has handled this report has led me to question their fidelity to our review process and the integrity of the research, at least when it comes to Israel and Palestine.”