Sari Bashi

Sari Bashi, Program Director at Human Rights Watch, leads the organization’s research, supervising a staff of 270 people in 50 countries, working on 18 regional and thematic human rights areas. Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Sari co-founded and ran Gisha, the leading Israeli human rights group promoting the right to freedom of movement for Palestinians in Gaza. She has taught international humanitarian law at Yale Law School and Tel Aviv University and supervised research at Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN). She is the author of Maqluba: Upside Down Love (Hebrew), an award-winning story about love in the shadow of the Israeli occupation, and she has worked as a correspondent for the Associated Press. Bashi earned her B.A. (summa cum laude) from Yale University and her J.D. from Yale Law School. She is a marathon and ultra-marathon runner and author of the Umm Forat blog about raising her children in the occupied West Bank. (www.ummforat.com).