JERUSALEM - Human Rights Watch on Tuesday hit out at a recent barrage of criticism that it was paying too much attention to Israel in its reports at the expense of other countries and groups in the Middle East.
"Israel is a small fraction of what we do," wrote the New York-based group's executive director Kenneth Roth in an editorial published in Israel's left-leaning Haaretz daily.
He said that Israel accounts for about 15 percent of the group's reports in the Middle East and receives five percent of its total budget.
The group has done extensive work on all players in the region, including the democratically elected Palestinian Hamas movement and Lebanon's popular and powerful Hezbollah.
"Our war coverage in the region has documented violations by all sides," Roth wrote. "No international human rights organisation has done more to highlight the war crimes of Hezbollah and Hamas."
Roth also defended against charges that HRW reports relied on accounts from "biased" witnesses, saying it conducted interviews with multiple witnesses and corroborated them with field visits, ballistics evidence and medical records.
And he hit out at criticism by co-founder and former chairman Robert Bernstein, who wrote in a recent New York Times editorial that the group was casting aside "its important distinction between open and closed societies."
"We apply the same international human rights standards to all countries, open and closed," Roth said. "All governments, regardless of their political system, are obliged to uphold the same international norms."
"At the heart of our critics' arguments lies the view that we should hold Israel to lower standards. There is no dispute that the country was founded on the ashes of genocide and is surrounded by hostile states and armed groups."
But "a country's conditions do not remove its obligations under international law... Whether a state is an aggressor or acting in self-defence, whether it faces a regular army or insurgents that commit abuses, the laws of war apply, imposing a duty to minimise civilian harm."
If the group's critics want to "challenge repressive regimes and combat armed groups that terrorise civilians, they will not serve that cause by trying to exempt Israel from human rights laws that are the best defence against such abuse.
"Nor does it help to attack those organisations that are working to uphold those laws around the world."
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