Photo: Dan Vernon

On 17 August, in advance of the 63rd session of the UN Human Rights Council, Al-Haq submitted a written statement on “The Need to Comprehensively Identify all Forms of Corporate Complicity in Israel’s Egregious Violations of International Law”.

As Israel advances its genocide and annexation of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), companies with vested interests in the dispossession, displacement and destruction of the Palestinian people continue business as usual. It is crucial to stress, at the outset, that companies have driven and enabled Israel’s process of displacement and replacement of the Palestinian population, foundational to the logic of settler-colonialism and apartheid.1 The corporate sector materially contributes to and benefits from Israel’s apartheid, occupation and genocide by providing the weapons, machinery and services required to destroy critical infrastructure, cultural spaces, livelihoods and productive assets, such as olive groves and orchards, as well as segregate and control communities and restrict access to natural resources. By helping to militarise and incentivise illegal Israeli presence in the OPT through increasing investment and corporate activity, and consequently the physical and mental destruction of the indigenous Palestinian population, the corporate sector has contributed to the creation of the conditions necessary for the mass forcible displacement, dispossession and erasure of the Palestinian people.

Ongoing commercial relations with Israel further establish their complicity in Israel’s violations of peremptory norms of international law. As highlighted by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in its Advisory Opinion of July 2024, include the right to self-determination, the prohibition against apartheid and racial segregation, and the prohibition against the unlawful acquisition of territory by force. Based on Israel’s illegal presence in the OPT, States are bound to ‘take steps to prevent trade or investment relations that assist in the maintenance of the illegal situation’.2 Yet, over two years on – and following a determination by the United Nations (UN) Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the [OPT], including East Jerusalem, Israel (CoI) that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.3 States have demonstrated a persistent failure to comply with their obligations under international law as recalled by the ICJ. Companies – also bound to refrain from engaging in or contributing to activities violating human rights under the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights – have shown a similar disregard for international law.

Corporate involvement in Israel’s settler-colonial apartheid regime, unlawful occupation and genocide has even increased. While the updated Database of businesses facilitating settlement activities in the OPT (‘UN Database’) listed a total of 158 companies from 11 countries, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) only reviewed 215 of the 596 businesses exposed in the submissions that responded to the public call for input.

As of May 2026, Israel’s Higher Planning Council had radically accelerated and normalised construction in the OPT, advancing 28,000 units since early 2025 and at least 41 new settlements. On 6 August 2026, Israel published a tender for 627 new housing units in the Kochav Yaakov settlement to ‘deepen the separation between Jerusalem and its Palestinian surroundings’. This unprecedented settlement expansion operates in tandem with increased corporate involvement, as evidenced by the 68 new companies added to the aforementioned UN Database, which primarily focus on construction, real estate, and quarrying.

However, the UN Database is far from exhaustive and key sectors fail to be included. Al-Haq notes in particular the profits generated by arms companies based in the United States (U.S.) since October 2023, including Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Caterpillar which provide weapons and machinery used by the Israeli authorities to maintain and expand settlements and their presence in the OPT generally. For instance, in January 2026, the U.S. approved a series of arms sales to Israel worth $6.67 billion. None of said companies are listed in the UN Database. The role of technology companies equally deserves attention, especially considering that, since 2021, Israel has significantly relied on AI at checkpoints across the West Bank. Furthermore, it uses ‘cloud computing and machine learning to store and process vast volumes of surveillance data […] to automate the identification and ranking of targets for attacks.’ Companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Palantir have provided Israel with ‘AI systems, cloud infrastructures and surveillance tools’, including intercepted communications. Such complicity continues to this day, as the $1.2 billion cloud computing contract signed in 2021 between Israel, Google and Amazon Web Services, called ‘Project Nimbus’, runs for 7 years. Again, none of these tech giants are listed in the UN Database. Furthermore, nonprofit organisations that abuse tax loopholes and provide significant financial support to the construction, maintenance, and proliferation of settlements – often under the guise of “charitable purposes” – contributing to and entrenching violations of international law in the OPT also continue to be omitted from the UN Database.

Finally, it is necessary to highlight the new era of corporate complicity in Israel’s ongoing Nakba heralded in by the ‘Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict’ (the ‘20-point plan’) which enables the permanent fragmentation, de facto annexation and resettlement, and foreign administration of Palestinian territory based on technocratic, corporate governance models.15 Disguised as an initiative to rebuild Gaza and unlawfully endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2803 on 17 November 2025, implementation of the 20-point plan includes Gaza being governed by a so-called ‘Board of Peace’ (BoP) tasked with ‘attracting investment’ and ‘the funding for the redevelopment of Gaza until such time as the Palestinian Authority has completed its reform program…and can securely take back control’.4

The 20-point plan reframes the urgent need to end Israel’s genocide, destruction, siege and unlawful occupation of Palestine as an economic opportunity, reducing Gaza and the Palestinian people to assets for exploitation within a neoliberal, free-market economy framework. Alongside the ‘Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation’ (GREAT) Trust, it envisions the extraction of gas and other natural resources, the transformation of Gaza into a “riviera”, and the prioritisation of foreign investment for private gain, all while denying Palestinians justice and sovereignty. Hence, rather than Palestine’s natural resources being used to fuel Palestinian industrial independence, they are treated as a strategic asset to exert ownership over and profit from. The consequence of this resource-centric, capitalist model is the creation of a permanent state of engineered vulnerability for the Palestinian people that have already been stripped of conditions necessary for survival.

Beyond the need to expand the UN Database to include nonprofit organisations fuelling settlement expansion in the West Bank, as well as corporations involved in the wholesale destruction and plunder of Gaza, based on Israel’s repeatedly stated aim of resettling the territory and acts carried out to realise this Zionist objective, States must actively ensure that businesses under their jurisdiction are not involved in or contributing to serious human rights violations. Failure to do so was what gave rise to the existence of the UN Database, and a failure to act on its findings will render the effort meaningless. Ignorance as to the role of the corporate sector in driving conflict, dispossession and destruction – of Palestine and the Palestinian people – can no longer be claimed, nor can States argue that they are unaware of the specific companies complicit in Israel’s commission of international crimes and other serious violations of international law.

States are obligated to sanction all listed companies, while the companies themselves must immediately divest from and end all relations with Israel’s genocidal, settler-colonial apartheid regime. The OHCHR, on the other hand, must endeavour to identify and further develop the UN Database to ensure it is comprehensive, up-to-date, and capable of addressing the longstanding corporate accountability gap.