Report accuses global firms of complicity in a system of occupation, surveillance, weapons
The active genocide of Palestinians by the State of Israel is being sustained by a deeply entrenched system of exploitative occupation and global profit. For multinational arms dealers, surveillance tech firms, financial institutions, and logistics companies, the occupation and genocide are big business, says a damning new report on the human rights situation in Occupied Palestine.
The report, “From Economy of Occupation To Economy of Genocide,” was presented to the 59th Session of the Human Rights Council on July 3, in Geneva, Switzerland. It reveals how corporate profiteering has underwritten death and destruction, while empowering Israel’s actions and existence as an occupier power.
“For some, genocide is profitable,” said Francesca Albanese, the report’s author and Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.
“In the past 21 months, while Israel’s genocide has devastated Palestinian lives and landscapes, the Tel Aviv stock exchange soared by 213 percent (USD), amassing $225.7 billion in market gains—including $67.8 billion in the past month alone,” she pointed out.
While life in Gaza is being obliterated and the West Bank is under escalating assault, the report reveals why Israel’s genocidal actions continue. For many, it is lucrative, said the report.
Investors and both private and public institutions are profiting unhindered by the political economy of occupation, which has turned genocidal. The report tells how Israel’s “forever-occupation” has become the ideal testing ground for arms manufacturers and big tech—providing boundless supply and demand, little oversight and zero accountability.
“Too many influential corporate entities remain inextricably financially bound to Israeli apartheid and militarism,” said Ms. Albanese.
She urges UN member states to sever all financial and trade ties with Israel and impose a full arms embargo. She described the crisis emblazing Gaza as “apocalyptic,” and said Israel is perpetrating “one of the cruelest genocides in modern history.”
“What I expose is not a list, it is a system, and that is to be addressed,” Ms. Albanese told the Human Rights Council, before delivering her report that named dozens of global firms complicit in facilitating Israeli settlements and military conflict in Gaza. “In Gaza, Palestinians continue to endure suffering beyond imagination,” she stated.
The report names companies supplying F-35s, drones, and targeting tech used to drop 85,000 tons of bombs on Gaza—six times the payload of Hiroshima in Japan.
It highlights tech giants running research and development hubs and data centers in Israel, exploiting Palestinian data for AI (Artificial Intelligence) warfare in what Ms. Albanese calls a “livestreamed genocide.”
It names energy firms that fueled Israel’s blockade, construction companies supplying equipment used to reduce Gaza to rubble and blocking Palestinian return. Even tourism sites, supermarkets, and universities are implicated in normalizing apartheid and Palestinian erasure, the report states.
The investigative report discusses how corporate interests bolster the dual Israeli settler-colonial logic of “displacement” and “replacement” aimed at confiscating land and Palestinian erasure.
It documents the part global companies play in Israel’s repressive occupation, illegal annexation, and Palestinians being denied self-determination in a stifling system of apartheid, and now genocide.
The report identifies 8 business sectors central to Israel’s settler-colonial economy, namely arms manufacturers, tech firms, building and construction companies, extractive and service industries, banks, pension funds, insurers, universities and charities.
The report argues these sectors are coordinated around the displacement and replacement agenda. It argues that their complicity feeds human rights violations like forced displacement, extrajudicial killings, and weaponized starvation. These offences are part of a calculated machinery of oppression, which needs urgent international accountability, said the report.
While it is impossible to fully capture the scale and extent of decades-long corporate connivance in occupied Palestine, the report exposes the intermix of economic interests with the systemic violence of settler-colonialism and genocide, showing how corporate interests are entangled in the suffering and dispossession of an entire people.
Alongside military firms, tech companies specializing in surveillance and incarceration—such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Palantir—play a key role in sustaining displacement, according to the report.”
They develop dual-use technologies such as biometric surveillance, AI targeting, and mass data systems used to enforce discriminatory control, restrict movement, and an unequal criminal justice system.
More than 371 settlements and illegal outposts were built, powered and traded with by companies facilitating the replacement by Israel of Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory.
From November 2023 to October 2024, Israel established 57 new colonies and outposts with Israeli and international companies supplying machinery, raw materials and logistical support.
For example, the report summarizes, Caterpillar, HD Hyundai and Volvo excavators and heavy equipment were used in the construction of illegal colonies for at least 10 years. Real estate companies like the US-based Keller Williams Realty LLC, through its local franchisee KW Israel, sold properties in illegal settlements to Israeli and international buyers.
The report was assembled from papers submitted by member states, rights defenders, companies, and academic sources. The Special Rapporteur received over 200 submissions helping build a database of 1,000 corporate entities linked to violations in occupied Palestine.
Forty-eight separate corporate actors, along with their parent companies, subsidiaries, franchisees, licensees, and consortium partners across sectors, were identified.
Ms. Albanese formally sent the 48 companies her findings in the report and evidence supporting the allegations against them. Eighteen companies responded, and “only a small number engaged with me in good faith,” with most saying “there was absolutely nothing wrong,” she said on July 3.
Below are some of their responses according to Ms. Albanese:
Booking.com: Denied moral responsibility for settlement listings.
Maersk: Denied shipping weapons; now halted West Bank settlement services following protests.
Volvo: Rejected criticisms; claims no direct operations in conflict zones.
Glencore: Categorically denies allegations.
Lockheed Martin: Points to the government-to-government nature of its sales.
Microsoft: Denies misuse; under pressure from shareholders to disclose HRDD practices.
Google/Alphabet: Strong internal criticism of the UN report; declined further comment.
The U.S. responded to the UN report by sanctioning Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the measures on July 9, citing a Trump-era executive order targeting the International Criminal Court (ICC).
He accused Albanese of aiding ICC efforts to investigate U.S. and Israeli nationals, and denounced her work as “unabashed anti-Semitism,” supportive of terrorism, and contemptuous of the West. Secretary Rubio claimed she escalated her campaign by pressuring companies worldwide—particularly American firms—and urging the ICC to prosecute their executives.
The sanctions drew sharp criticism from UN officials. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk called for their reversal, warning that punitive actions undermine constructive engagement. UN Spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said such measures against UN experts set a “dangerous precedent.”
Amnesty International’s Agnes Callamard called the move a continuation of U.S. efforts to shield Israel from accountability, urging Washington to end its unconditional support for Israeli impunity.
At the end of her report, Ms. Albanese concludes, in part: “The enduring ideological, political and economic engine of racial capitalism has transformed the Israeli displacement-replacement economy of occupation into an economy of genocide.”
Colonial endeavors and related genocides were historically driven and enabled by business. Commercial interests have long contributed to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their lands. It is domination known as “colonial racial capitalism,” says the report.
The exploitation described in the report is redolent of the sordid history of Israel’s backer and fellow settler-colonial power, the United States. America, like Israel, was conceived in the dispossession, land theft, and genocide of the Indigenous Native Americans and enslavement of Black Africans.
“She is full of blood from murdered people,” wrote the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad on page 116 in His monumental book, “The Fall of America,” published in 1973, referring to America.
He said America fulfills a prophetic passage in the Bible book of Habakkuk 2:12: “Woe to him that buildeth a town with blood, and stablisheth a city by iniquity!”
“America was founded and built with blood and established by iniquity. She killed the aboriginal inhabitants (Indians) to establish herself as an independent people at the great loss of lives of the original owners,” wrote the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
“Her great progress has been made by the work of iniquity. She has robbed many people; and the blood of her slaves, the so-called Negroes, has stained the earth here and elsewhere, stained by her hands,” He said.
According to the UN, Special Rapporteurs are independent human rights experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council and are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work.
“My report exposes a system … so structural … so widespread … so systemic, that there is no possibility to fix it and redress it,” Ms. Albanese stated. “It needs to be dismantled,” she added.