NEW UN REPORT: The Corporations Profiting from Our Corpses

Tech giants, arms dealers, and banks are not bystanders to Israel’s assault — they are complicit, and they are cashing in.

I grew up hearing my uncle say Palestine is not just occupied — it’s been privatized.

It wasn’t until now, after more than 55,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, that I fully understood what he meant. The cranes tearing through our homes carry corporate logos. The bulldozers gutting olive groves, the drones slicing the skies, the bombs pulverizing entire neighborhoods — they come stamped with brand names and investment portfolios. In boardrooms from New York to London, genocide isn’t a tragedy. It’s a business model.

This week, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese finally said what Palestinians have known for decades: Gaza has been turned into what she calls an “economy of genocide.” This is not accidental, not a byproduct of chaos. It is organized, deliberate, and profitable.

Read the full report: here

“Colonial endeavors and their associated genocides have historically been driven and enabled by the corporate sector,” Albanese writes. Israel’s assault on Palestinians, she says, has become “the ideal testing ground for arms manufacturers and Big Tech — providing significant supply and demand, little oversight, and zero accountability.”

The numbers tell the story. Since Israel’s assault on Gaza began in October 2023, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange has surged nearly 180 percent, adding over $150 billion in market value. Israel’s military spending skyrocketed 65 percent to $46.5 billion — one of the highest per capita military budgets in the world. As Gaza’s hospitals, homes, and schools crumble, Western companies cash in.

The report names names. Microsoft. Amazon. Google. Lockheed Martin. Caterpillar. Airbnb. Palantir Technologies. Volvo. Hyundai. IBM. Vanguard. BlackRock.

These aren’t distant, faceless corporations. They’re the architects of the infrastructure that sustains Israel’s apartheid and fuels its killing machine.

When Israeli F-35 fighter jets roared over Gaza’s neighborhoods and dropped their payloads on apartment buildings and hospitals, those jets carried the fingerprints of over 1,600 companies across eight countries. Lockheed Martin, leading the project from the United States. Leonardo, the Italian arms manufacturer. FANUC, the Japanese robotics giant. An international assembly line of destruction.

I keep thinking about Shaban. A fellow Palestinian. A student. Burned alive in the hospital, still attached to the IV, and no one able to get to him. His friends said they found he wanted to be a software engineer. Shaban couldn’t resist the flames.

He was not a random casualty. His death came courtesy of algorithms, code, contracts signed in glass towers continents away.

The report makes clear that Israel’s military systems have been turbocharged by Western tech giants. When Israel’s internal cloud system became overwhelmed during the early days of the war, Microsoft Azure, Google, and Amazon stepped in, providing critical cloud and AI infrastructure to keep Israel’s war machine running.

Palantir Technologies, notorious for surveillance operations, has been deeply embedded in Israel’s repression. Their predictive policing software, battlefield AI, and automated targeting platforms — like the chillingly named “Lavender” and “Where’s Daddy?” — process real-time data to generate kill lists with minimal human oversight.

There are, in Albanese’s words, “reasonable grounds to believe” these tools directly contribute to the automated targeting and killing of Palestinians.

Shaban is not in their databases. His textbooks are not part of their algorithm. But his body is counted among the wreckage.

In Gaza, they ration water. They ration oxygen under collapsed buildings. They ration grief because coffins run out faster than the dead.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, shareholders sip coffee as profits pour in. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is among the top investors in Palantir, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Amazon, and Caterpillar. Vanguard holds similar stakes, their billions woven through the companies enabling the occupation. Investors receive quarterly returns built on the bones of Gaza’s children.

It doesn’t end with fighter jets. On the ground in the West Bank, Caterpillar bulldozers demolish Palestinian homes to make way for illegal settlements. Hyundai and Volvo machinery level hillsides and farmland. Airbnb and Booking.com list vacation rentals in these settlements, transforming apartheid into a travel destination.

Even food is entangled in this system. Netafim, an Israeli irrigation company, 80 percent owned by Mexico’s Orbia, supplies water systems to illegal settlements built on stolen Palestinian land. In those same territories, Palestinians survive on water deliveries once a week, if at all.

Our suffering is multi-sectoral. It’s financialized. It’s dressed up in the language of innovation and development, but it’s always the same: Palestinian erasure for corporate gain.

The legal frameworks are unambiguous. Under international law, corporations are required to avoid causing or contributing to human rights abuses, whether directly or through their business relationships. States must regulate corporate behavior, and failure to do so opens the door to criminal liability.

In July 2024, the International Court of Justice ruled Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem illegal, declaring it an act of aggression. The court ordered Israel’s withdrawal — a ruling Israel continues to ignore. Albanese’s report makes clear that economic ties, investments, and corporate dealings that sustain this illegal occupation may amount to complicity in international crimes under the Rome Statute.

International law may move slowly, but it isn’t vague when it comes to corporate complicity in war crimes. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UN Doc A/HRC/17/31) make it clear: corporations cannot profit from genocide and claim ignorance. They are obligated to map their operations, their technologies, their investments — and cut ties the moment those links enable human rights abuses, no matter how indirect. The OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises (2023 Revision) demand the same, warning that companies have an explicit duty to avoid causing or contributing to human rights violations, even when abuses occur deep inside complex supply chains. But Gaza shows us what happens when these rules exist on paper, while corporations exist in profit margins. The legal consequences run deeper. Under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998), individuals — including corporate executives, investors, and suppliers — can face criminal liability for aiding and abetting international crimes. Article 25(3)(c) holds accountable those who "aid, abet or otherwise assist" in war crimes (Article 8), crimes against humanity (Article 7), or genocide (Article 6). Even financial, technological, or logistical support is enough to meet that threshold when it enables the killing of civilians or the destruction of protected infrastructure. The 1948 Genocide Convention, binding on nearly every state, goes further — obligating states and, by extension, entities operating within them to prevent and punish complicity in genocide, including economic or corporate involvement. The legal architecture exists. The obligations are written. What’s missing is enforcement — while Palestinian lives are buried beneath rubble branded with corporate logos.

“Entities that previously enabled and profited from Palestinian elimination and erasure within the economy of occupation,” the report states, “instead of disengaging are now involved in the economy of genocide.”

History has seen this pattern before. Genocide is rarely declared in real time. It’s documented in reports. It’s debated in conference rooms. Meanwhile, bodies accumulate. Families vanish. Lives like Shaban’s are extinguished — not by nameless forces, but by corporate contracts and investment portfolios.

I don’t live in Gaza. I carry the grief of it in my chest, the headlines, the videos, the names of the dead stitched into my thoughts. But across every border, in every city where these corporations operate, people carry the power to disrupt this system.

The corporations killing us sharpen their technologies on our bodies, then sell them to the world. The same surveillance systems tested on Palestinians appear in police departments across the US. The same bulldozers demolishing homes in the West Bank flatten communities elsewhere.

This is not distant. It’s deliberate. The question is whether those watching — investors, workers, consumers — will continue to look away while corporations profit from our corpses.

Palestine has been privatized. But the resistance — that can never be outsourced.

The economy of genocide is manufactured. It can be dismantled.