On 26 September 2025, the United Nations (UN) Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released an update of its Database on Businesses Facilitating Settlement Activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). We welcome this update as an important and indispensable step toward the dismantlement of Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise and unlawful occupation and apartheid. In advance of the current database, Al-Haq submitted four communications to the UN Database in response to the call for input in 2024, including three joint communications. Al-Haq urged the expansion of the Database to include non-profit organisations engineering settlement expansion in Palestine.

The updated UN database lists 158 companies from 11 countries, adding 68 new companies to the previous database. The new companies included on the database focus primarily on business activities related to construction, real estate, mining and quarrying. We commend the office for this expansion and for finally adding Heidelberg Materials AG, which actively pillages Palestinian quarries on appropriated Palestinian lands, providing material which is used to build and expand illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Al-Haq welcomes the continued inclusion of Airbnb and Booking.com on the Database –– Al-Haq has continuously denounced their involvement in Israel’s settlement enterprise, entrenching Israel’s settler colonial apartheid regime. In December 2024, Al-Haq’s Forensic Architecture Unit published an in-depth interactive mapping of the locations of Airbnb and Booking.com exploiting Palestinian properties across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, along with a documentary testimony from a dispossessed Palestinian farmer, whose land was appropriated and used by settlers for an Airbnb rental.

The UN Database was mandated “to be updated annually” under Human Rights Council Resolution 31/36 in 2016. Despite the clear wording reflecting the frequent evolution of worldwide companies’ investments in such activities, the present update is only the third release of the Database in almost a decade –– the last update being published in June 2023. The failure to hold Israeli and international corporations to account has only further incentivised Israel’s escalated aggression, settlement and de facto annexation of the West Bank.

Al-Haq reiterates that “delays in the update of a UNHRC-mandated database are not only damaging to the integrity and credibility of the HRC and OHCHR but also serve to shield Israel and those companies benefiting from or contributing to Israel’s intentionally wrongful acts from their international legal responsibilities”. This delay is partly due to “inadequate political will and ostensible bureaucratic obstacles” that “have emerged within a highly pressurised environment, in which certain states have demonstrated hostility to the implementation of the mandate”.

We note that, in updating the database, the OHCHR, “with the resources made available”, only reviewed 215 of the 596 businesses exposed in 2024 submissions that followed the public call for input and “continues to review the allegations concerning the businesses whose assessment could not be completed in time for the present report.” In this regard, we stress again that financial considerations cannot serve as a justification for OHCHR’s failure to accomplish its mandate, and which it has had ample time to complete.

The very existence of the database stems from Third States’ failure to abide by their obligations to bring the settler colonial apartheid regime and unlawful occupation to an end. As rightly recalled by UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk, Third States are under the obligation to “act with diligence to ensure that business enterprises operating in conflict-affected areas are not involved in or otherwise materially contributing to serious human rights violations or abuses”. The 10 States hosting the listed companies, namely Canada, China, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States of America, have manifestly failed to comply with this obligation.

On 19 July 2024, the International Court of Justice issued a landmark Advisory Opinion on the Legal consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the [OPT], including East Jerusalem, ruling that “all States are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. They are also under an obligation not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory”. The court specified that, as part of such obligations, States must “take steps to prevent trade or investment relations that assist in the maintenance of the illegal situation created by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

We once again stress that the UN Database is a crucial tool for the promotion and protection of the Palestinian people. Israel has taken advantage of its long-standing and politically motivated impunity to engage in further gross violations of international law. Many private actors have taken part in and benefited from these international crimes, including apartheid, persecution and genocide.

Hence, we urge OHCHR to ensure the financing and annual update of the UN Database as per its mandate to provide a comprehensive and updated view of corporate complicity in Israel’s human rights violations. We call on all States, companies and individuals to properly implement it, and divest with immediate effect from Israel’s unlawful settler colonial apartheid regime. Finally, we call on host States to sanction the companies listed on the Database and prevent them from further contributing to Israel’s settlement enterprise.