UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s report identifies over 60 companies alleged to be involved in ‘sustaining Israel’s settler-colonial project’.
The United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, Francesca Albanese, urged nations to end all trade and financial relations with Israel, including a complete arms embargo, and to remove international support for what she referred to as an “economy of genocide”.
Albanese spoke in a speech to the Human Rights Council in Geneva on Thursday as she delivered her latest report, which listed dozens of companies she charged were implicated in aiding Israeli oppression and violence against Palestinians. The occupied Palestinian territory is apocalyptic,” she said. “Israel is guilty of one of the most brutal genocides of the modern era.”
Almost 57,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since the war, in its 22nd month, started; hundreds of thousands have been displaced repeatedly, cities and towns destroyed, hospitals and schools bombed, and 85 per cent of the blockaded and shelled enclave is now occupied by the Israeli military, states the UN.
The report, From economy of occupation to economy of genocide, outlined what it referred to as “the corporate machinery supporting Israel’s settler-colonial project of displacement and replacement of the Palestinians in the occupied land”.
The report targeted arms manufacturers, tech companies, heavy machinery firms and banks for their “complicity” in Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, ranging from supporting Israeli expansion on occupied territory to facilitating Palestinian surveillance and assassination.
The report noted that whilst political leaders had been neglecting their duty to make Israel stop its Gaza bloodshed, “far too many corporate interests have benefited from Israel’s economy of illegal occupation, apartheid and now, genocide”.
It urged the global community to “hold the private sector to account” for the complicity of companies in Israel’s atrocities, by ensuring that they were held accountable through the law for their role in breaches of international law.
“Every state and every corporate organisation has a prima facie obligation to disengage from or cease their involvement with this economy of occupation,” Albanese said, going on to suggest that had the corporate world practiced due diligence, it “would have disengaged completely and in total from its association with the Israeli economy.”.
Addressing journalists in Geneva following her address, Albanese stated that there were firms and individuals “who have profited from the violence, the killing, the maiming, the destruction in Gaza and other areas of the occupied Palestinian territory”.
