Former Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth called the plight of the 101 hostages held in Gaza one of a number of "utter irrelevancies" following the International Criminal Court's decision to issue arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
"The Israeli government responded to the ICC war-crime charges with the usual diversionary excuses – the need to liberate the hostages, Hamas’s use of human shields, Israel’s democracy and self-defense, supposed ICC antisemitism – all utter irrelevancies," Roth wrote in an op-ed for the British newspaper The Guardian and in a post on X this week.
The post received numerous comments criticizing Roth for dismissing the hostages, who include one-year-old Kfir Bibas and five-year-old Ariel Bibas, as "irrelevant."
Roth led Human Rights Watch for 30 years, during which he was accused of politicizing the once-prestigious human rights NGO and bringing antisemitism into the organization. A 2022 report by NGO Monitor accused Roth of legitimizing antisemitism under the guise of human rights.
In 2006, during the Second Lebanon War, then Anti-Defamation League chairman Abe Foxman accused Roth of engaging in a "classic anti-Semitic stereotype about Jews” after Roth that “an eye for an eye – or, more accurately in this case, twenty eyes for an eye – may have been the morality of some more primitive moment."
In 2009, Human Rights Watch founder Robert Bernstein wrote an Op Ed in the New York Times criticizing the direction the organization he founded had taken under Roth's leadership.
Bernstein wrote that Human Rights Watch issued far more condemnations of Israel than it did of “authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records.”
"Recently it has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state," he wrote. "Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields. These groups are supported by the government of Iran, which has openly declared its intention not just to destroy Israel but to murder Jews everywhere. This incitement to genocide is a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide."
"Leaders of Human Rights Watch know that Hamas and Hezbollah chose to wage war from densely populated areas, deliberately transforming neighborhoods into battlefields. They know that more and better arms are flowing into both Gaza and Lebanon and are poised to strike again. And they know that this militancy continues to deprive Palestinians of any chance for the peaceful and productive life they deserve. Yet Israel, the repeated victim of aggression, faces the brunt of Human Rights Watch’s criticism," Bernstein said.