Human Rights Watch ‘Demonizing’ Israel in Wake of Hamas Terror Onslaught: NGO Report

NGO Monitor, an independent Jerusalem-based research institute, observed HRW’s extensive focus on condemning Israel after the largest single-day killing of Jews since the Holocaust.

By Andrew Bernard, Algemeiner

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has been engaged in a campaign of “demonization and tokenism” against Israel in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 invasion of the Jewish state and massacre of civilians, according to a new analysis published on Wednesday.

NGO Monitor, an independent, Jerusalem-based research institute that tracks anti-Israel bias among nongovernmental organizations, tracked how HRW has overwhelmingly devoted its resources to condemning Israel in the wake of the largest single-day killing of Jews since the Holocaust.

“Since the brutal October 7 Hamas pogrom, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has hyperactively published statements and condemnations, primarily demonizing Israel,” the report says. “As of October 23, they had made 7 public statements, 2 ‘Q&As,’ a letter to the [International Criminal Court (ICC)] Prosecutor, more than 20 opinion essays and media appearances, and well over 100 tweets by officials who frequently deal with Israel.”

An analysis of this output, according to NGO Monitor, “demonstrates HRW’s long-standing hostility towards Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people; lack of credibility on all issues related to Israel and Jews; tokenism with respect to Israeli victims of brutality, including hostages, in a transparent attempt to deflect the evidence of antisemitism; and inflated claims to expertise and relevance in the realms of human rights and international law.”

Critics have long accused HRW of having an anti-Israel and even antisemitic bias. In 2021 the group published a report accusing Israel of being an “apartheid” state, a claim that HRW employees have frequently repeated in their writings on the war against Hamas.

“For decades the US has ignored apartheid by Israeli authorities against Palestinians, sending weapons, giving visa deals to Israeli tourists and brokering normalization with Arab dictators,” HRW program director Sarah Bashi posted on X/Twitter on Oct. 7 while the massacre was still ongoing. “If only this war would persuade the US to address the abuses that are feeding the violence.”

HRW’s first public statement issued on Oct. 9 likewise overwhelmingly focused on the alleged “crimes” of Israel while only briefly noting that Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist group, “apparently shot civilians en masse.”

“Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) have recently faced perhaps unprecedented repression,” the statement says. “During the first nine months of 2023, Israeli authorities killed more Palestinians in the West Bank in 2023 than in any year since the United Nations began systematically recording fatalities in 2005 … Israel’s unlawful closure of Gaza, including its generalized ban on the travel of Palestinian residents who live in this 40-by-11 kilometer (25-by-7 mile) strip of land, with few exceptions, recently entered its 17th year.”

NGO Monitor argued that this claim that the closure of Gaza is “unlawful” is spurious and that HRW’s “inflated claims to expertise and relevance in the realms of human rights and international law” are part of a broader campaign against Israel at the International Criminal Court and elsewhere.

“HRW explicitly links its work to ‘the importance of the International Criminal Court (ICC)’s ongoing investigation’ — another theme that appears throughout HRW statements on the massacre and war,” the NGO Monitor analysis says. “Given the massive NGO campaign to prosecute Israelis at the ICC, inherent bias in the ICC process, and Israeli rejection of ICC jurisdiction, this too is part of HRW’s twenty-year ‘lawfare’ campaign against Israel.”

In August, HRW released a report accusing the Israeli military of “gunning down Palestinian children,” despite three of the four cases examined by the group involving teenagers who launched Molotov cocktails, rocks, or fireworks at the security services.

Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7 from its Palestinian enclave of Gaza, from which the Jewish state withdrew all its troops and civilian population in 2005.