Overview
Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, has presented her most recent report to the Human Rights Council in July 2025. The report, From economy of occupation to economy of genocide, focuses attention to the role of corporations in sustaining and profiting from Israel’s settler-colonial project in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) and its ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza.
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The economy of settler-colonial occupation and the economy of genocide are deeply entwined. The report documents the critical role that corporations have played in driving Israel’s settler-colonial erasure of the Palestinian people from their land, contributing to a process of displacement and replacement and profiting from decades of human rights violations and international crimes. In this “displacement-replacement economy of occupation,” the same corporations that facilitate the destruction of Palestinian land and infrastructure are involved in building and profiting from the colonial agricultural, infrastructure and enterprises that replace it.
The Special Rapporteur’s key finding, however, lies in the transformation she has documented since October 2023, whereby these “long-standing systems of control, exploitation and dispossession” have developed into structures “mobilized to inflict mass violence and immense destruction” (para 26). Corporate entities operating within the economy of settler-colonial occupation, engaging in “a mode of domination known as “colonial racial capitalism”” are now enabling, financing and profiting from an economy of genocide. Additionally, they “enable the denial of self-determination and other structural violations in the occupied Palestinian territory, including occupation, annexation and crimes of apartheid and genocide, as well as a long list of ancillary crimes and human rights violations, from discrimination, wanton destruction, forced displacement and pillage to extrajudicial killing and starvation” (para 2).
In order to illustrate the different facets of this economy of genocide, the Special Rapporteur’s report examines in turn the contribution of corporations in the displacement of Palestinians, their replacement and, finally, in enabling genocide. The report focuses on eight key sectors which have been instrumental to the settler-colonial economy and its genocidal transformation: military including weapons manufacturers; surveillance and carcerality; heavy machinery; construction; natural resources including water, electricity, gas, and fuels; trade, including agribusiness, global retail, and occupation tourism; finance; and knowledge production.
In addition to over 45 corporate entities named in the Special Rapporteur’s report (see table below), the Special Rapporteur has developed a database of 1000 companies, mapping implicated companies across the world (para 8).
Legal context and framework
Before diving into the factual evidence of corporate involvement in the economy of genocide, the Special Rapporteur sets out the ..
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