Human Rights Watch yearly report details all the human rights events that occurred across the world [Getty]
Human Rights Watch world report 2025 saw a number of Middle Eastern countries being included in significant human rights related events, with Israel’s war on Gaza take centre stage as one of the most important human rights issue.
This includes being part of a trend of fraying international norms, double standards by liberal democracies on human rights, and a conflict underscoring the importance of institutions like the ICCÂ in seeking accountability.
The 536-page report provides a detailed look at human rights-related issues across the world in 2024, with 16 countries from the Middle East and North Africa featured.
“In 2024, the Israeli military continued to kill, wound, starve, and forcibly displace thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, and to destroy their homes, schools, hospitals, and infrastructure at a scale unprecedented in recent history,” the report said in its section on Israel and Palestine.
Among the rights abuses highlighted were Israeli crimes committed Gaza and violence against Israeli captives.
Likewise, the expansion of violence by Israeli authorities and settlers in the occupied West Bank was also noted, as were abuses by the Palestinian Authority, and the ill treatment and torture of Palestinians in Israeli prisons.
Israel’s blocking of access to water to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip led HRW to conclude that such action is a crime against humanity and may amount to the crime of genocide.
Elsewhere, the report covered Sudan’s civil war, the global response to which was labelled “grossly inadequate” by HRW executive director Tirana Hassan.
Meanwhile in Syria, the downfall of dictator Bashar al-Assad and the end of a five-decade regime that oversaw countless human rights abuses was described by Hassan as offering “insight into the limits of autocratic power”.
Hassan said that amid the growing lack of legitimacy and respect human rights have globally that defending such rights is “the challenge – and the opportunity – of our time”.
