📅 July 5, 2025
“We are witnessing not just genocide in Gaza—but a genocide made profitable.”
— UN Special Rapporteur, A/HRC/59/23
“This report is written from the heart of darkness. It is penned with a broken hand from a broken land for a broken people. But its words are not broken. They are the words of law and of longing. They are the words of those who are not yet silenced. It is written for Palestinians, first and foremost. It is also addressed to those who remain silent, indifferent or complicit. And it is a call to action for those who are not.”
— Introduction, UN Report A/HRC/59/23
In an unprecedented and unflinching report to the UN Human Rights Council, the Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory has laid bare the truth that much of the world’s corporate, academic, and financial architecture is actively complicit in Israel’s occupation, apartheid, and now, genocide in Gaza.
This isn’t just about military aggression. This is about the machinery of global capital, powering bulldozers that raze homes, surveillance systems that watch over apartheid walls, and refineries that turn oil into jet fuel for airstrikes. This is about the way boardrooms, bank vaults, and branding teams serve as silent accomplices to war crimes.
In an unprecedented and unflinching report to the UN Human Rights Council, the Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory has laid bare the truth that much of the world’s corporate, academic, and financial architecture is actively complicit in Israel’s occupation, apartheid, and now, genocide in Gaza.
🔩 Bulldozers of Erasure: The Infrastructure of Destruction
Multinational giants like HD Hyundai, Doosan, Volvo, and Caterpillar have long supplied the equipment used to flatten Palestinian homes—in Masafer Yatta, East Jerusalem, Jabalia, and Rafah. Their machines are not just demolishing buildings—they are reconfiguring the map to erase memory, history, and presence.
Despite documented violations and international appeals, these companies continue to supply equipment that Israel uses to confiscate land, expand illegal colonies, and turn Gaza into rubble.
Even more chilling, in Rafah and Jabalia, logos of these machines were removed to evade identification—a criminal corporate maneuver by any international legal standard.
🏗️ Building on Stolen Land: Settlements, Roads & Real Estate
While some companies destroy, others build. Over 371 illegal colonies and outposts have been erected, often facilitated by international logistics, materials, and finance. In 2024 alone, 57 new outposts emerged, and the colony budget doubled to $200 million.
Firms like Heidelberg Materials, Hanson Israel, and CAF (Spain) support this expansion—supplying cement, quarrying Palestinian resources, and building rail systems that segregate and replace indigenous life.
Real estate platforms like Keller Williams Realty and Home in Israel market these colonies globally—even hosting roadshows in the U.S. and Canada to sell homes on stolen land.
💧 The Politics of Resource Starvation
Since October 2023, Israel has weaponized resources—cutting water, electricity, fuel, and medicine to Gaza. The result? Total collapse of hospitals, waterborne disease outbreaks, and near-total blackout.
Meanwhile, Mekorot, Israel’s national water company, supplies clean water to settlements but leaves Gaza 95% waterless. Chevron and BP extract gas from Palestinian maritime territory and turn it into profits—$453 million in royalties to Israel in 2023 alone.
This is not a failure of infrastructure. This is deliberate infrastructure as a tool of extermination.
🛢️ Energy Giants, Jet Fuel, and Bombing Runs
Chevron, BP, and Petrobras provide the crude oil, gas, and jet fuel that powers Israel’s military. Two refineries—Haifa and Ashdod—process these fuels, with Ashdod supplying jet fuel directly to the Israeli Air Force for Gaza bombings.
Even after public condemnation, coal from Colombia and South Africa continues to arrive, ensuring Israel's war machine never runs dry.
🍊 Food Apartheid: Agriculture and Agribusiness on Occupied Soil
Companies like Tnuva and Netafim dominate agriculture across the colonies, while Palestinian farms are starved of irrigation and support. After the 2014 war, Gaza’s dairy sector was decimated—allowing Tnuva to gain 160% market control.
Netafim, while branding itself as sustainable, helps depopulate Palestinian areas by monopolizing irrigation technology in the Jordan Valley—a greenwashed version of ethnic cleansing.
🛒 Global Retail, Tourism & Whitewashed Occupation
Israeli settler products, labeled deceptively, now line supermarket shelves globally. Companies like Maersk, Amazon, Booking.com, and Airbnb actively normalize the occupation—delivering to colonies, promoting settler tourism, and laundering profits through “humanitarian” branding.
Even when companies like Airbnb briefly delisted colonies, they quickly reversed under pressure—prioritizing revenue over rights.
💰 Financing Genocide: The Money Trail
Between 2023 and 2025, Israel issued $13 billion in bonds to finance its war. These were underwritten by global banks like Barclays and BNP Paribas, bought up by BlackRock, Vanguard, Allianz, PIMCO, and pension funds in Norway, Canada, and the U.S.
These investors now hold stakes in the companies manufacturing bombs, surveillance tools, and bulldozers used in crimes against humanity. Some of their profits go directly to military charities and settler projects.
Religious and ideological funders—like the Jewish National Fund and Christian Zionist groups—raised over $12 million in 2023 for colony expansion and settler training.
🎓 Knowledge Production and Academic Complicity
Israeli universities are deeply entwined in legitimizing apartheid—especially through law, archaeology, and Middle East studies. Science departments serve as R&D arms of the military, working with Elbit Systems, IAI, IBM, and Lockheed Martin to develop weapons tested on Palestinians.
International institutions—from MIT to Technical University of Munich—channel billions in research funds into these programs, giving apartheid a scholarly cloak.
Post-October 2023, student protesters exposing this complicity have faced repression—not because they are antisemitic, but because they threaten financial interests and ideological control.
📢 Final Word: What Must Be Done
The Special Rapporteur concludes with urgent recommendations:
- Corporate withdrawal from all business linked to Israeli war crimes
- Reparations to the Palestinian people, including an apartheid wealth tax
- Criminal prosecution of executives for aiding genocide
- Public accountability through boycott, divestment, and sanctions
- Transparency in academic and financial institutions complicit in these crimes
“What comes next depends on everyone.”
— UN Special Rapporteur, A/HRC/59/23
The world can no longer claim ignorance. Gaza’s genocide is not only militarized—it is economized, monetized, and legitimized by systems many of us work in, shop from, or invest in.
We must choose: profit or principle, silence or solidarity.
📌 Sources: UNHRC Report A/HRC/59/23, WhoProfits, SOMO, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, AFSC, Al-Haq, and additional verified data.
📥 Downloadable reference sheet: Available on request
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