Two core members of the Israel-Palestine team at Human Rights Watch have resigned amid a dispute over a shelved report that concluded Israel’s denial of the right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants amounted to a crime against humanity.
The lead author of the report, Omar Shakir, served as the Israel-Palestine director of the prominent New York-based rights group for nearly a decade. He and Milena Ansari, an assistant researcher, said they resigned over what they described as the continued stalling of the publication of the report, which they said had been set for release two months ago.
In an emailed statement this week, Human Rights Watch described the report as a “draft” and said it had been “paused pending further analysis and research.”
Differences over the report erupted while its leadership of the organization was in transition. Human Rights Watch named Philippe Bolopion, a veteran of the group, as its new executive director in November. He quickly decided to hold off publishing the report, according to Mr. Shakir’s resignation letter.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes in the territory that is now Israel during the hostilities surrounding the establishment of the state in 1948. They were barred from returning.
The United Nations agency that deals with the Palestinian refugees says that they and their descendants now number around six million. Any wholesale return to their original homes would most likely deny Israel its Jewish majority.
Mr. Shakir said in a phone interview on Wednesday from Jordan that the leadership’s decision to hold the report appeared to be based on several overlapping concerns. Fundamentally, though, he said he believed the group’s leadership feared the report might be perceived as “challenging the Jewishness of the Israeli state” and it was a risk the organization did not want to take.
Human Rights Watch says it has long supported the principle of the right of return for Palestinian refugees. The dispute, according to current and former staff members of Human Rights Watch, is over whether there is a solid legal basis for the sweeping determination that denying the right of return to a particular location causes a level of suffering that rises to a crime against humanity.
“The report in question raised complex and consequential issues,” the group said in its statement. It added, “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.”
Mr. Shakir wrote in his resignation letter, which The New York Times reviewed, that the leadership’s decision constituted an “overruling of the normal vetting process” after the report had been finalized and after the group’s relevant experts had signed off on it.
“I’m not aware of any precedent in the organization’s history for such an extraordinary decision,” he added. The resignation letters were dated Jan. 15. Mr. Shakir’s took effect on Tuesday, and Ms. Ansari’s will take effect later this month.
People familiar with the inner workings of the group suggested that Mr. Shakir had worked to push the report through the system while the organization’s leadership was in flux.
One of those people, Kenneth Roth, served as executive director of the organization from 1993 to 2022. He said in an interview on Wednesday, “A researcher used a time of leadership transition to try to push a report through the review process with a novel legal theory that was unsupported by the facts and law.”
While Mr. Roth has not read the report himself, he said, he was familiar with its legal arguments.
“Various staff members expressed concern with the report during the review process,” Mr. Roth said, adding that the report should have been sent back earlier “for a more defensible interpretation of the law as applied to the factual research done.”
Mr. Shakir strongly denied taking advantage of the leadership transition, saying that the report went through a seven-month review process and that “the very same people review reports regardless of who the executive director is.” He added that reports dealing with Israeli or Palestinian issues “always warrant extra scrutiny.”
The plight of the Palestinian refugees is one of the thorniest issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The fate of the refugees was one of the topics to be discussed as part of a negotiated, comprehensive peace deal. No peace talks have taken place in over a decade.
Human Rights Watch published a report in November 2025 on Israel’s military operations that year in the three refugee camps in the northern part of the occupied West Bank. The report found that the forcible displacement of 32,000 people from the camps and the destruction of hundreds of homes by Israeli forces amounted to war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.
Mr. Shakir said the intention of the shelved report was to make a connection between the recent displacements of Palestinians and those of decades past as “a cautionary tale” and a call to action.
But experts said the same level of suffering might not apply to a third-generation descendant of a Palestinian refugee who is living, say, in Canada.
Isabel Kershner, a senior correspondent for The Times in Jerusalem, has been reporting on Israeli and Palestinian affairs since 1990.
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