HRW Israel-Palestine director resigns, accuses watchdog of 'cooking the books'

The former Israel-Palestine director of Human Rights Watch (HRW) told Middle East Eye that the organisation’s senior leadership was “cooking the books” by selectively ignoring the fact that Israel is committing “crimes against humanity” for denying Palestinian refugees the right of return.

Omar Shakir resigned from HRW in a letter to colleagues on Tuesday, in protest against the organisation’s decision to block a report that alleged Israel is committing a crime against humanity for denying displaced Palestinians and their ancestors a path to return to their ancestral lands.

In the letter, which was shared with MEE, Shakir wrote that HRW’s new executive director, Philippe Bolopion, “blocked without legitimate basis” a report titled, “‘Our Souls Are in the Homes We Left’: Israel’s Denial of Palestinians’ Right to Return and Crimes Against Humanity”.

He said the report was shelved even though it had undergone a thorough review and was on the cusp of publication, to the point that donors had been briefed, the report had been coded into HRW’s website, and an embargoed press link had been prepared.

Shakir told colleagues that he had come under “intense external and internal scrutiny” and suffered from “personalised attacks” as HRW’s Israel-Palestine director, particularly after Israel’s war on Gaza erupted after the Hamas-led 7 October attacks on southern Israel on 7 October 2023 and the subsequent war on the enclave.

The war has been deemed a genocide by the United Nations, genocide scholars, world leaders and institutions. Over 71,800 Palestinians have been killed to date. 

However, he remained at his job because he believed in HRW’s “absolute fidelity” to fact-based reporting and “applying the law”.

“I can no longer say that,” he said in the letter.

“Our ED’s decision in late November to halt publication of our report on the denial of the right of return for Palestinian refugees…his continued overruling of the normal vetting process and his insistence that only the findings he dictated can be published has compromised our absolute commitment to the law and the facts,” Shakir wrote.

“I could not continue to give so much of myself to Human Rights Watch, as I have for over a decade, when I no longer believed in the commitment of the organisation’s leadership to publishing the facts as we document them and consistently applying the law,” Shakir told MEE over WhatsApp.

MEE reached out to HRW for comment on Shakir's statements but did not receive a reply by the time of publication. 

'More characteristic of politics than human rights'

Palestinian right of return is the political and legal principle that says Palestinian refugees, along with their descendants, have a right to return to their original homes and properties. The principle is codified in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

HRW has previously acknowledged that denying the right of return violates international law, including in a 2023 report on the Chagos Islands, Shakir noted.

Palestinians were first expelled from their homes in 1948 after Israel proclaimed itself a state in an event known as the Nakba, or the tragedy. Palestinians were also expelled following the 1967 war when Israel occupied East Jerusalem and took control of the occupied West Bank and Gaza from Jordan and Egypt, respectively.

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Shakir said he was informed by HRW’s chief advocacy officer that Bolopion halted the report because he was concerned it would be misinterpreted by “detractors” as HRW endorsing a “call to demographically extinguish the Jewishness of the Israeli state”.

“A principled human rights organization does not allow concerns about how a report will be received by some and the possible ramifications of that to stop them for calling for respecting people’s fundamental rights or to shape the scope of its findings,” Shakir wrote in his letter.

HRW has long come under fire from other governments in the Middle East for its research and advocacy.

For example, in 2014, the former executive director and another senior staff member were denied entry to Egypt.

Shakir also said that HRW’s 2024 report on the Hamas-led 7 October 2023 attack on Israel sparked backlash from Palestinians in the region who saw it as “justifying Israel’s onslaught in Gaza”, but the report was published because “it was the principled thing to do”.

“Allowing ‘pragmatism’ to dictate the scope of research and legal findings, as the Executive Director said he did, is cooking the books to arrive at the desired outcome,” Shakir told MEE, “[and] an open door to the sort of selectivity more characteristic of politics than human rights”.