Israel’s genocide against Palestinians is being sustained by a system of exploitative occupation and profit, a UN expert warned today in a new report to the Human Rights Council that reveals how corporate profiteering and monetary gain has enabled and legitimised Israel’s illegal presence and actions.

“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. For some, genocide is profitable,” said Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967. 

Albanese’s report exposes the corporate infrastructure profiting from Israel’s economy of occupation — and its deadly transformation into an economy of genocide. The report underscores how Palestine has become the epicentre of a global reckoning, exposing the failure of international business and legal systems to uphold even the most basic rights of one of the world’s most dispossessed peoples.

“Corporate actors are deeply entwined in the system of occupation, apartheid and genocide in the occupied Palestinian territory,” the Special Rapporteur said. “For decades, Israel’s repression of Palestinian people has been scaffolded by corporations, fully aware of and yet indifferent to, decades of human rights violations and international crimes.”

Forty-eight separate corporate actors, along with their parents, subsidiaries, franchisees, licensees and consortium partners across sectors are identified in the Special Rapporteur’s report, including weapons manufacturers, technological corporations, financial institutions and construction and energy firms.

Albanese found that these entities have failed their most basic legal responsibilities to exercise their leverage to bring an end to the violation at stake or terminate relations and disengage. Instead, they have treated Israel’s illegal enterprise in the occupied Palestinian territory as ordinary economic activity—willfully ignoring documented, systemic abuses, even as atrocities mounted after 7 October 2023.

“These actors have entrenched and expanded Israel’s settler-colonial logic of displacement and replacement – and this is not accidental,” the Special Rapporteur said. “It is the function of an economy built to dominate, dispossess, and erase Palestinians from their land.”

The report named companies supplying F-35s, drones, and targeting tech that enabled 85,000 tons of bombs – six times the amount of Hiroshima – to be unleashed on Gaza. It highlighted tech giants that have set up R&D hubs and data centres in Israel, using Palestinian data for AI warfare, fueling what Albanese calls a ‘livestreamed genocide.’ The report points to energy giants having fuelled Israel’s blockade, while construction companies continued to supply the equipment that has turned Gaza to rubble and prevented the return and reconstitution of Palestinian life. Even seemingly neutral actors – tourism sites, supermarkets, and universities are normalising apartheid and the systematic erasure of Palestinian life, the Special Rapporteur’s report found.

“This report shows why Israel’s genocide continues: because it is lucrative for many,” Albanese said. She warned that the International Court of Justice 2024 rulings and the ICC arrest warrants should have put all actors—including corporations—on notice.

“The serious, structural and sustained nature of Israel’s crimes and violations triggered a prima facie responsibility to disengage — one that many corporations ignored,” she said. “Corporate fixation on narrow technicalities and isolated violations rather than confronting the structural illegality of their ties to Israel’s occupation is disingenuous,” she said.

Albanese urged member states to impose a full arms embargo, suspend trade and investment agreements, and hold corporate entities accountable for violations of international law.

“Meanwhile, corporations cannot claim neutrality: they are either part of the machinery of displacement—or part of dismantling it.”

“Palestine is a mirror held up to the world’s moral and political failures,” she said. Recalling reckonings over corporate complicity in apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany, Albanese said Palestine today represents a defining moment of whether global markets can exist without promoting and profiting from injustice and impunity.

“Ending this genocide requires not only outrage but rupture, reckoning, and the courage to dismantle what enables it.”

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Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, Professor of international law and history at the Geneva School of Diplomacy, has been a visiting professor at numerous universities in the US, Canada, Germany, Spain and Switzerland. From 2012 to 2018 he was the UN’s Independent Expert on International Order and produced 14 reports for the UN General Assembly and Human Rights Council, formulating “ 25 Principles of International Order”. From 1980 to 2003 he was a senior lawyer with the UN Human Rights Office in Geneva, served as Secretary of the UN Human Rights Committee and Chief of the Petitions Department. He is the author of ten books including “Building a Just World Order” (Clarity Press, 2021), “The Genocide against the Armenians” (Haigazian University Press, Beirut, 2010, translated into Spanish and Polish), “United Nations Human Rights Committee Case Law” (N.P.Engel, Strasbourg, 2009). He has published numerous articles concerning the Armenian genocide and the right of self-determination of the Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh and has spoken on these issues before the European Parliament. He is a US and Swiss national, resides in Geneva, Switzerland, with his wife Carla, a Dutch jurist, and was President of P.E.N. International Centre Suisse from 2006-9 and again from 2013-17.

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