As the second anniversary of the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre approaches, Amnesty International, the Nobel Prize–winning human rights monitor, has still not published a long-delayed report on the atrocity—and faces internal resistance to doing so, according to internal Amnesty emails and other documents obtained by The Free Press.
In the works for well over a year, but long since superseded by media reports and other NGO publications, Amnesty’s report is now set for release “in the coming weeks,” an Amnesty spokesperson says.
Yet a faction within Amnesty has waged a last-ditch effort to persuade the group’s senior leaders not to publish the report, arguing that even a belated acknowledgment of Hamas’s crimes might help Israel in the court of public opinion.
“Our concern is about timing and impact,” Usman Hamid, the section director for Amnesty in Indonesia, emailed the organization’s top officials on August 8. “The situation in Gaza is at a peak of humanitarian crisis, famine is unfolding, and the Israeli security cabinet has just approved plans for full occupation. In this climate, there is a real risk the report could be used to divert attention from the current crisis or justify ongoing genocide.”
