UN Special Rapporteur denounces Israel's 'genocide economy' and calls for an arms embargo
A new report by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, entitled ‘From economy of occupation to economy of genocide’, has received resounding support from UN Human Rights Council member states.
The report by Francesca Albanese investigates the corporate machinery sustaining Israel’s “settler-colonial project of displacement and replacement of the Palestinians in the occupied territory” and lists dozens of companies and corporations that Albanese says are profiteering from Israel's genocide of the Palestinians.
Albanese has called for an immediate arms embargo against Israel. “This is not a war. This is a genocidal campaign,” she said yesterday (Thursday).
Speaking to the UN Human Rights Council, Albanese said that the occupied territory had become “an optimum testing ground for arms manufacturers and big tech, with little oversight and zero accountability”, while investors and private and public institutions had profited handsomely.
“The situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is apocalyptic. In Gaza, people continue to endure suffering beyond imagination. Israel is responsible for one of the cruellest genocides in modern history. Official figures count over 200,000 killed or injured,” Albanese said.
She added: “Member states must impose a full arms embargo on Israel, suspend all trade agreements and investment relations and enforce accountability, ensuring that corporate entities face legal consequences for their involvement in serious violations of international law.
“Corporate entities must urgently cease all business activities and terminate relationships directly linked, contributing to, and causing human rights violations and international crimes against the Palestinian people.”
Forty-eight corporate entities, along with their parents, subsidiaries, franchisees, licensees and consortium partners, are identified in the Special Rapporteur’s report. They include weapons manufacturers, tech corporations, financial institutions, and construction and energy firms.
The entities listed include Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc., Microsoft, and Amazon.
“In 2021, Israel awarded Alphabet Inc. (Google) and Amazon.com, Inc. a $1.2 billion contract (Project Nimbus) – largely funded through Ministry of Defense expenditure – to provide core tech infrastructure,” the report states.
“Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon grant Israel virtually government-wide access to their cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, enhancing data processing, decision-making and surveillance and analysis capacities.”
IBM has operated in Israel since 1972, training military and intelligence personnel, the report adds, and, since 2019, IBM Israel has operated and upgraded the central database of the Population and Immigration Authority, “enabling the collection, storage and governmental use of biometric data on Palestinians, and supporting the discriminatory permit regime of Israel”.
The report also cites the US company Palantir Technologies Inc., “whose tech collaboration with Israel long predates October 2023”.
The company expanded its support to the Israeli military post-October 2023, the report says.
“There are reasonable grounds to believe Palantir has provided automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scaled-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision-making,” it adds.
The report says that the heavy machinery companies Caterpillar Inc., Hyundai, and the Volvo Group have provided equipment linked to the destruction of Palestinian property.
It also cites Booking Holdings Inc. and Airbnb, Inc., stating that the companies list properties and hotel rooms in Israeli colonies.
“Booking.com has more than doubled its listings in the West Bank – from 26 in 2018 to 70 by May 2023 – and tripled its East Jerusalem listings to 39 in the year post-October 2023,” the report states.
“Airbnb has also amplified its colonial profiteering, growing from 139 listings in 2016 to 350 in 2025, collecting up to 23 per cent commission.”
‘Death-trap foundation’
Speaking to the UNHRC yesterday, Albanese said Israel had dismantled the last function of the UN in Gaza: humanitarian aid.
“Its so-called 'Gaza Humanitarian Foundation' is nothing else than a death trap, engineered to kill or force the flight of a starved, bombarded, emaciated population marked for elimination," she said.
Israel, she said, had used the genocide as an opportunity to test new weapons, customise surveillance, and use drones, rudder systems and other unmanned technology “to exterminate a population without restraint”.
Albanese said arms companies had turned near-record profits by equipping Israel with cutting-edge weaponry "to unleash 85,000 tons of explosives, six times the power of Hiroshima on Gaza".
Delegates voice their support
Numerous UNHRC delegates spoke during yesterday’s session.
The representative for the state of Palestine, Ibrahim Khraishi, said that Albanese’s report provided a “comprehensive analysis of how an economy of occupation became an economy of genocide backed by a series of transnational corporations, from the industry of weapons to AI and digital surveillance”.
The report accurately described this system as “colonial, racial capitalism”, he said.
Speaking for Palestine’s Independent Commission for Human Rights, Issam Aruri said via a video link that Albanese’s findings exposed the catastrophic reality endured by the Palestinian people, particularly in Gaza, where atrocities unfolded daily.
“There is a darker, often overlooked dimension to this tragedy: the complicity of private corporations in fuelling and profiting from the suffering,” he said.
“We are not speaking of fringe actors. These are major corporations, technology giants and arms manufacturers supplying tools, intelligence and weapons that turn Gaza into both a battlefield and a business venture.”
Aruri added: “When a family is killed by a drone strike in their home or when a medic is tracked using spyware and then targeted, behind that attack may lie a corporate logo, a line of code, a signed contract in a distant capital.”
He urged the Human Rights Council to include the companies in question in the UN's business and human rights database and ensure accountability through domestic courts under universal jurisdiction.
“Those who sell the tools of extermination must no longer hide behind boardrooms,” Aruri said. “Silence is not neutrality. Silence is complicity, and the people of Gaza can bear no more silent partners in their destruction.”
Ireland’s ambassador to the UN, Noel White, said that his government was progressing with legislation banning the import of goods from settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
Turkey's representative, Muzaffer Uyav Gültekin, said the Occupied Palestinian Territory had become a laboratory for surveillance technologies, autonomous weapon systems, and crowd-control tactics.
“These systems are tested on a population living under siege and marketed as combat-proven to international clients,” Gültekin said. “This is profiteering from war crimes.”
The representative for Mauritius, Brian Joseph Neil Glover, said: "Mauritius remains deeply concerned by the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in the Occupied Palestine Territory. We are dismayed indeed that, since October 7, 2023, more than 57,000 innocent Palestinians have been killed with over 2 million displaced.”
South Africa’s representative, Mxolisi Nkosi, told the UNHRC: “Much as we need to hold Israel accountable for its depravity, we too must ensure that corporate entities are similarly held accountable for the role that they play in this regard.”
Malaysia’s representative, Nadzirah Osman, said: “Malaysia strongly condemns Israel's deliberate targeting of civilians as well as the perpetration of forced starvation and the obstruction of humanitarian aid as weapons of war.
“The systematic escalation of these measures is genocidal in nature and amounts to ethnic cleansing and total colonization.”
Pro-Israel representatives lambast report
Pro-Israel representatives lambasted Albanese and her report in their interventions and the president of the session urged delegates “to remain within acceptable limits” to ensure respectability in the discussion. “I ask you, in particular, to refrain from personal attacks against mandate holders,” he said.
The representative for the European Union of Jewish Students, the World Jewish Congress, and the International Association of Jewish lawyers and Jurists, Emma Hallali, gave a joint statement via a video link. She said that Albanese’s report vilified Israel's existence and stretched legal concepts such as apartheid and genocide “beyond recognition”.
The report contained “inflammatory rhetoric, ideological framing and legal distortions”, she said, and its credibility was “undermined by its reliance on unverified activist sources and politicized platforms”.
Complicity exposed by report ‘just the tip of the iceberg’
Albanese noted that, since October 2023, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange had risen 213%, amassing more than $225.7 billion in market gains, including 67.8 billion in the past month alone.
Albanese said in conclusion: "This is not a conflict. This is not a war. It's not an escalation of violence. It is intentional ethnic cleansing."
The summary of her report states: “While political leaders and governments shirk their obligations, far too many corporate entities have profited from the Israeli economy of illegal occupation, apartheid and now genocide.
“The complicity exposed by the report is just the tip of the iceberg; ending it will not happen without holding the private sector accountable, including its executives.
"International law recognizes varying degrees of responsibility – each requiring scrutiny and accountability, particularly in this case, where a people’s self-determination and very existence are at stake.
“This is a necessary step to end the genocide and dismantle the global system that has allowed it.”
Albanese urges the International Criminal Court and national judiciaries to investigate and prosecute corporate executives and/or corporate entities for their part in the commission of international crimes and laundering of the proceeds from those crimes.
“The present report is written at the cusp of a profound and tumultuous transformation. Globally witnessed atrocities require urgent accountability and justice, which demand diplomatic, economic and legal action against those who have maintained and profited from an economy of occupation turned genocidal. What comes next depends on everyone,” she states.
Speaking at a press conference, she said: “My report exposes a system, something that is so structural and so widespread and so systemic that there is no possibility to fix it and redress it. It needs to be dismantled.”
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