"Palestine is a revealer of the world we live in"

Francesca Albanese on how companies profit from the Gaza genocide

As daily massacres continue in Gaza and its population is being starved by Israel’s siege, people around the globe are marching the streets to demand their governments take action. But few have listened. A report by UN-Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese reveals why the atrocities in Gaza keep unfolding: because they are lucrative.

Francesca Albanese is UN-mandated to document human rights abuses in the occupied Palestinian Territory. This Monday, she published a report which highlights how the private sector enables Israeli human rights violations. «The genocide seems unstoppable because there are people and organizations who profiteer from it», Albanese tells me. «Despite the apparently never-ending war, the Israeli stock exchange rises, and certain companies’ profits augmented enormously.»

The report lists dozens of companies who aid Israel’s genocide and decade-long illegal occupation – and reveals how they are connected. «I still have to find a sector of our life that is not intertwined with the system that has embroiled the lives of millions», argues Albanese. «There was an economy of occupation before October 2023, which has now turned into an economy of genocide. And we are all, directly or indirectly, responsible. From what we buy and where we put our money to the technology we use. We are all connected to this».

Displacement Industries

The human rights expert found that the military, heavy equipment and tech sectors directly help facilitate the illegal displacement of Palestinians – by providing machinery for demolitions, military equipment for attacks and tech for surveillance. In turn, they make huge profits, while arms companies have even used Palestinians as a testing-ground for new weaponry to be sold on international markets as battle-proven.

As complicit tech firms, Albanese’s report lists Microsoft, Alphabet Inc. (Google), Amazon, and Palantir. The latter is a US-based company which is believed to provide Israel with AI-Systems that generate target-lists and help generate battle-plans. The company announced a new partnership with Israel in 2024 – and in 2025, Palantir’s Chief Executive Officer responded to accusations that his company killed Gazans by saying: «Mostly terrorists, that’s true».

Palantir also provides AI-technology for the Swiss publisher Ringier, who owns Blick, Beobachter and Schweizer Illustrierte. Upon request, Ringier refused to answer questions about its business relations with the AI company that openly admits to killing Palestinians.

Replacement Industries

While probably the most lucrative, companies involved in the illegal displacement of Palestinians are just one element of an extensive network of profiteers. «Once Palestinians have been segregated or displaced, the replacement sector allows companies to construct colonies or their infrastructure», Albanese tells me. «Colonies are probably the most symptomatic element of the occupation, but they are just part of it. It's the entire state of Israel that is committing crimes as it breathes.»

Albanese’s report lists construction, agribusiness, global retail, tourism, real estate, and energy companies as sectors that help facilitate the infrastructure needed to replace Palestinian life with Israeli presence – or with infrastructure needed to sustain it. An example is the Swiss-based Glencore, which was involved in coal shipments accounting for 15 percent of Israeli coal imports in 2023 and 2024. Though also used for civilian use, coal imports help sustain Israel’s military aggressions and illegal occupation, argues the report.

Those who enable

Albanese moreover lists companies that enable Israeli human rights violations through knowledge, narratives or investment. She points at financial, research, legal, media and advertising firms, while focusing on the financial and academic sectors.

«Israeli universities have not challenged the apartheid or the occupation. They are a pillar of the settler colonial ideology and lend legitimacy and a sense of normalcy to Israel», Albanese says. She adds: «Israel, since the beginning of its creation inside Palestine, has always been a military state. This military nature influences everything. It's in the way people think, in the way the society reflects upon itself, and also in the Universities.» Israeli academic institutions thus often provide the military with research, legitimacy or training – and through collaborations with the Israeli academic sector, some foreign institutions become complicit too.

Meanwhile, the financial sector funds Israel and corporations complicit in its human rights violations. For example US-based Blackrock, which also operated in Switzerland and invests in arms companies like US-based Lockheed Martin, a company Albanese describes as «pivotal to the genocidal arsenal of Israel.» The Swiss investment giant moreover holds large shares of Palantir, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet Inc., and invests in the US-firm Caterpillar, whose heavy equipment has, according to the report, «been used to carry out mass demolitions (...) raid hospitals and bury alive wounded Palestinians.»

«We need to stand united»

While Palestinians pay the heaviest price for Israel’s human rights violations and the private sector’s exploitative role in them, Albanese argues that Palestine is not an isolated incident, but rather «serves as a revealer of the world we live in». One, where democracy dies at the hands of shareholders: «There is a collusion between state power and economic interests. It seems that political interests do not align with what the people are urging their representatives to do. The fact that most Western governments stand in solidarity with Israel instead of the people who are being genocided is shocking, but it's not surprising – because this is the world we live in: a world where governments respond to private interests and ideology more than their people's will.»

Albanese’s report thus demands that «corporate relations with Israel must cease until the occupation and apartheid end and reparations are made.» Moreover, the corporate sector and its executives «must be held to account, as a necessary step towards ending the genocide and disassembling the global system of racialized capitalism that underpins it.»

To that end, Albanese requests UN members to impose sanctions and weapons embargoes and to suspend trade agreements and investments. The human rights expert furthermore calls on the International Criminal Court and national judiciaries to investigate and prosecute corporations and their executives for involvement in human rights violations.

Her message to ordinary citizens: «We need a strategy of holding people to account, whether in the business sector, in the universities or in the governments. The secret is that we need to stand united, because as individuals we are frail and defeatable. But if we stand together, they cannot fire us all, arrest us all or silence us all. We will make the difference. The question is not if, but when. Because this will determine how many people we'll be able to save.»