UN Expert: Corporate Profiteering Fuels Israel’s “Economy of Genocide” in Palestine

UN Expert: Corporate Profiteering Fuels Israel’s “Economy of Genocide” in Palestine

Albanese emphasizes that “This report shows why Israel’s genocide continues: because it is lucrative for many”.

RMN News Human Rights Desk
July 5, 2025

GENEVA – A new report from a United Nations expert warns that Israel’s actions against Palestinians, described as genocide, are being sustained by a system of exploitative occupation and profit, with corporate profiteering enabling and legitimizing Israel’s presence and actions. Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, highlights that genocide is proving profitable for some, noting a dramatic surge in the Tel Aviv stock exchange.

According to Albanese’s findings, the Tel Aviv stock exchange soared by 213 percent (USD) in the past 21 months, accumulating $225.7 billion in market gains, including $67.8 billion in the most recent month alone. Her report details how Palestine has become a focal point for global accountability, exposing the shortcomings of international business and legal systems in upholding fundamental rights for one of the world’s most dispossessed populations.

The Special Rapporteur’s report identifies forty-eight separate corporate actors—including their parents, subsidiaries, franchisees, licensees, and consortium partners—across various sectors. These encompass:

• Weapons manufacturers
• Technological corporations
• Financial institutions
• Construction firms
• Energy companies

Albanese found that these entities have failed their basic legal responsibilities to exert influence to end violations or to terminate their relationships and disengage. Instead, they have treated Israel’s enterprise in the occupied Palestinian territory as ordinary economic activity, “wilfully ignoring documented, systemic abuses” even as atrocities intensified after October 7, 2023.

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The report charges that these corporate actors have “entrenched and expanded Israel’s settler-colonial logic of displacement and replacement,” arguing that this is not accidental but rather the function of an economy designed to dominate, dispossess, and erase Palestinians.

Specific examples of corporate complicity highlighted in the report include:

• Companies supplying F-35s, drones, and targeting technology that enabled 85,000 tons of bombs to be unleashed on Gaza—six times the amount dropped on Hiroshima.
• Tech giants establishing R&D hubs and data centers in Israel, utilizing Palestinian data for what Albanese calls “AI warfare,” fueling a “livestreamed genocide”.
• Energy giants fueling Israel’s blockade.
• Construction companies supplying equipment that has turned Gaza to rubble and prevented Palestinian return and reconstitution.
• Even seemingly neutral actors like tourism sites, supermarkets, and universities are normalizing apartheid and the systematic erasure of Palestinian life.

Albanese emphasizes that “This report shows why Israel’s genocide continues: because it is lucrative for many”. She asserts that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) rulings in 2024 and International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants should have put all actors, including corporations, on notice. Despite the “serious, structural and sustained nature of Israel’s crimes and violations” triggering a prima facie responsibility to disengage, many corporations ignored this obligation, instead focusing on “narrow technicalities and isolated violations” rather than the structural illegality of their ties.

The Special Rapporteur urged member states to take decisive action, including imposing a full arms embargo, suspending trade and investment agreements, and holding corporate entities accountable for violations of international law. She concluded with a stark warning: “corporations cannot claim neutrality: they are either part of the machinery of displacement—or part of dismantling it”.

Albanese likens the current situation in Palestine to previous “reckonings over corporate complicity in apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany,” describing it as a defining moment for global markets to 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,” she stated.