Senior Human Rights Watch researcher Omar Shakir and assistant researcher Milena Ansari quit the organization, alleging that HRW had blocked the publication of a report finding that Israel’s denial of the Palestinian right of return was a “crime against humanity.”
“I've resigned from @hrw after 10+ yrs—most as Israel/Palestine Director—after HRW's new ED pulled a finalized report on the right of return for Palestinian refugees on [the] eve of its release & blocked for weeks its publication in a principled way,” Shakir, the head of HRW’s Israel and Palestine team, announced on Tuesday.
HRW said that “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.”
In his resignation letter, obtained by The Guardian and The Jewish Current, Shakir wrote, “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… As such, I am no longer able to represent or work for Human Rights Watch.”
The drafted report, titled "Our Souls Are in the Homes We Left: Israel’s Denial of Palestinians," was completed in August 2025 and had been reviewed by eight separate departments, where concerns were raised.
The 33-page document argues that the denial of the Palestinian right of return, including for those who left in 1948 and 1967, is a crime against humanity based partially on a 2018 ICC pre-trial finding, which determined that preventing the return of Rohingya to Myanmar could be prosecuted as a crime against humanity.
Concern about the report's scope
In October, chief advocacy officer Bruno Stagno Ugarte reportedly emailed to express his concern about the report’s scope. Ugarte suggested that the report focus on the recent Palestinian displacements from Gaza and the West Bank, claiming it may “resonate better.”
Ugarte added he was 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.”
Tom Porteous, HRW’s acting program director, had voiced similar worries. While acknowledging the report was well researched, he wrote he was concerned about how 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.”
While officials at HRW were reportedly concerned that the reports could hurt the organization’s optics, NGO Monitor’s legal advisor Anne Herzberg told The Jerusalem Post that the respectability of the group was already damaged by allowing Shakir a platform “as a career anti-Israel BDS agitator.”
“While at HRW, he tried to get Israel get kicked out of FIFA, launched the apartheid slander campaign, the starvation libel, and promoted the genocide calumny, all on the flimsiest if not blatantly false legal and factual claims. He routinely minimized Hamas' international crimes and exploitation of the civilian population of Gaza,” Herzberg said. “In the wake of October 7, HRW did little to nothing to advocate for Israeli victims and the hostages. HRW abetted his outrageous behavior for years, so it was rich, but not surprising, to hear Ken Roth, former HRW Executive Director, call Shakir's latest screed legally indefensible.
“Since Roth's departure in August 2022, HRW has struggled to find a replacement and appears to be in a state of chaos. Ken Roth has turned on Shakir, not because he has finally found his moral conscience, but because he is desperate to preserve his legacy. Part of his and HRW's failed legacy, however, was hiring Shakir in the first place."
Shakir has authored 12 articles for HRW since Hamas’s October 7 attacks in 2023, according to his HRW page. None of the articles listed focused exclusively on the crimes committed by Hamas and its Palestinian terrorist allies, while almost all levied accusations against the Jewish state.
According to NGO Monitor, the researcher has consistently supported a one-state framework. He was deported in 2019 after the Jerusalem District Court and the Supreme Court denied his appeals to restore his visa following the Interior Ministry's 2018 decision to revoke it.
The pause in the report’s publication has reportedly caused significant unrest within the organization. The Guardian reported that 200 staff members signed a letter claiming that HRW’s decision 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.”
Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of HRW, told The Guardian, “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.”