Know-how corporations globally are actively “aiding and abetting” Israel’s “crimes of apartheid and genocide” in opposition to Palestinians, mentioned United Nations (UN) particular rapporteur in an pressing name for the businesses to stop their enterprise actions within the area.
In an investigative report revealed 30 June inspecting “the function of company entities in sustaining the unlawful Israeli occupation and its ongoing genocidal marketing campaign in Gaza”, Francesca Albanese, the particular rapporteur for the “human rights scenario in Palestine”, outlined the important thing function the expertise sector performs in “sustaining the Israeli settler-colonial undertaking of displacement and substitute”.
Particularly, she highlighted how the “repression of Palestinians has develop into progressively automated” by the growing provide of highly effective army and surveillance applied sciences to Israel, together with drones, synthetic intelligence (AI)-powered focusing on methods, cloud computing infrastructure, knowledge analytics instruments, biometric databases and high-tech weaponry.
She mentioned that if the businesses supplying these applied sciences had carried out the correct human rights due diligence – together with IBM, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Palantir – they might have divested “way back” from involvement in Israel’s unlawful occupation of Gaza and the West Financial institution.
“After October 2023, long-standing methods of management, exploitation and dispossession metamorphosed into financial, technological and political infrastructures mobilised to inflict mass violence and immense destruction,” she mentioned. “Entities that beforehand enabled and profited from Palestinian elimination and erasure throughout the financial system of occupation, as an alternative of disengaging at the moment are concerned within the financial system of genocide.”
Beneath worldwide regulation, nonetheless, Albanese identified the mere indisputable fact that due diligence has been carried out doesn’t absolve corporations from authorized legal responsibility over their function in abuses. As an alternative, the legal responsibility of corporations is set by each their actions and the last word human rights affect.
“At a minimal,” mentioned Albanese, “company entities immediately linked to human rights impacts should train leverage or take into account termination of their actions or relationships. Failure to behave accordingly could give rise to legal responsibility.”
Noting that “colonial endeavours and related genocides have traditionally been pushed and enabled by the company sector”, Albanese known as on all company entities lively in Israel to “promptly stop all enterprise actions and terminate relationships immediately linked with, contributing to and inflicting human rights violations and worldwide crimes in opposition to the Palestinian folks”.
She added that these company entities must also pay reparations to the Palestinian folks, which ought to occur within the type of a wealth tax alongside the strains of post-apartheid South Africa.
“The Particular Rapporteur urges the Worldwide Prison Court docket and nationwide judiciaries to analyze and prosecute company executives and/or company entities for his or her half within the fee of worldwide crimes and laundering of the proceeds from these crimes.”
In her suggestions, Albanese additionally calls on UN member states to impose sanctions and full arms embargoes on Israel, together with for dual-use applied sciences and equipment, in addition to to droop all commerce agreements and funding relations.
Tech sector complicity
Giving particular examples, Albanese highlighted Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s provide of applied sciences to the Coordination of Authorities Actions within the Territories (COGAT, which oversees the implementation of Israel’s insurance policies within the West Financial institution and Gaza), in addition to the Israeli jail service and police; Microsoft’s embedding of its tech all through the police, prisons, universities and faculties, in addition to the mixing of its tech immediately into the army equipment since 2003; and Palantir’s provide of assorted knowledge platforms and automatic decision-making methods.
Albanese added that, as a result of lots of the methods carried out to observe and management Palestinians “generate growing volumes of information”, cloud storage and computing applied sciences have additionally develop into more and more essential for Israel.
In July 2024, an Israeli colonel described cloud tech as a weapon in each sense of the phrase Francesca Albanese, United Nations particular rapporteur
“Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon grant Israel just about government-wide entry to their cloud and synthetic intelligence applied sciences, enhancing knowledge processing, decision-making, and surveillance and evaluation capacities,” she mentioned.
“In October 2023, when the Israeli inner army cloud overloaded, Microsoft, with its Azure platform, and the Undertaking Nimbus consortium stepped in with important cloud and synthetic intelligence infrastructure. Their Israel-located servers guarantee knowledge sovereignty and a defend from accountability, below beneficial contracts providing minimal restrictions or oversight. In July 2024, an Israeli colonel described cloud tech as a weapon in each sense of the phrase, citing these corporations.”
Such cloud platforms additionally underpin the usage of AI-powered focusing on methods, comparable to Lavender, Gospel and The place’s Daddy?, which course of huge quantities of information to generate goal lists for the Israeli Defence Drive (IDF).
An investigation by Israeli outlet +972 Journal present in April 2024 that hundreds of Gazans have been marked for loss of life by Lavender, whereas a former Israeli intelligence officer beforehand informed the identical outlet in November 2024 that the Gospel system basically facilitates a “mass assassination manufacturing unit”.
Albanese additional highlighted how IBM has been concerned in coaching Israeli army and intelligence private since 1972, and since 2019 has operated an enormous biometric database that underpins “the discriminatory allow regime of Israel”.
In Could 2024, Storebrand – Norway’s second largest asset supervisor after the oil fund – divested from IBM over its provision of biometric database applied sciences to Israel. Storebrand mentioned that whereas it tried to “enter a dialogue” with IBM about its function within the area, the tech firm was “not keen to debate” the problem.
Consequently, Storebrand, which manages greater than £74.5bn in belongings and investments, bought the 750,000 shares it held within the firm in March 2024, which had a reported worth of roughly £110m.
Interconnected company complicity
Nonetheless, the evaluation isn’t restricted to the expertise sector alone, with Albanese additionally discussing the separate however intersecting roles of arms producers, development corporations, service industries, banks, pension funds, insurers, universities and charities.
For instance, whereas Caterpillar would ordinarily fall into the development sector, she famous the way it provides automated, remote-controlled bulldozers on to the Israeli army, which it then makes use of to demolish houses, mosques and life-sustaining infrastructure. There have additionally been stories of those bulldozers being utilized by the IDF to bury wounded Palestinians alive.
Equally, whereas AirBnB and Reserving.com would often be categorised as a part of the service or tourism business, their nature as on-line journey platforms imply there’s a technological part to their itemizing of properties positioned in territories that Israel illegally occupies.
“Reserving.com has greater than doubled its listings within the West Financial institution – from 26 in 2018 to 70 by Could 2023 – and tripled its East Jerusalem listings to 39 within the 12 months post-October 2023,” she mentioned. “Airbnb has additionally amplified its colonial profiteering, rising from 139 listings in 2016 to 350 in 2025, amassing as much as 23 per cent fee. These listings are linked with proscribing Palestinian entry to land and endangering close by villages.”
Albanese additionally collapses the excellence between expertise and arms corporations, noting that “Israeli and worldwide weapons producers…have refined applied sciences that allow Israel to accentuate oppression, repression and destruction”, together with air defence platforms, drones, AI-powered focusing on instruments and superior fighter jets.
She added that a lot of this innovation, significantly for the expertise and defence sectors, is underpinned by shut collaboration with the training sector, which actively contributes to the “ideological scaffolding of apartheid” whereas additionally offering materials assist within the type of technical experience.
“Science and expertise departments function analysis and improvement hubs for collaborations between the Israeli army and arms contractors, together with Elbit Techniques, Israel Aerospace Industries, IBM and Lockheed Martin, and so contribute to producing the instruments for surveillance, crowd management, city warfare, facial recognition and focused killing, instruments which can be successfully examined on Palestinians,” she mentioned, including that many universities have upheld ties with Israel regardless of the post-October 2023 escalation.
“One among many British examples, the College of Edinburgh holds almost £25.5m ($31.72m) (2.5 per cent of its endowment) in 4 tech giants – Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM – central to the Israeli surveillance equipment and the continuing Gaza destruction. With each direct and listed investments, the college ranks among the many most financially entangled establishments in the UK of Nice Britain and Northern Eire.”
She added that the college additionally immediately companions with corporations aiding Israel’s army operations via its sharing of analysis that “immediately hyperlinks it with assaults on Palestinians”.
Conclusions
Albanese ends her report by noting that “whereas life in Gaza is being obliterated,” the “genocide” continues “as a result of it’s profitable for a lot of”.
She added that enterprise and human rights obligations “can’t be remoted from Israel’s unlawful settler-colonial enterprise within the occupied Palestinian territory, which now features as a genocidal machine”.
“Enterprise continues as typical, however nothing about this technique, through which companies are integral, is impartial,” she mentioned. “The entities named within the current report represent a fraction of a a lot deeper construction of company involvement, profiteering from and enabling violations and crimes within the occupied Palestinian territory.
Had they exercised due diligence, company entities would have ceased involvement with Israel way back…any funding sustains a system of great worldwide crimes Francesca Albanese, United Nations particular rapporteur
“Had they exercised due diligence, company entities would have ceased involvement with Israel way back. At the moment, the demand for accountability is all of the extra pressing: any funding sustains a system of great worldwide crimes.”
She famous the “immense asymmetry of energy” between these entities and the worldwide justice system “exposes a elementary international governance hole” that have to be closed.
Albanese isn’t the primary to lift considerations over tech corporations’ function in Israel’s human rights abuses and system of apartheid.
In 2020, for instance, the UN launched a listing of 112 companies that it claimed have “immediately and not directly enabled, facilitated and profited from the development and progress of the settlements” within the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
“Tech corporations, with a couple of exceptions, are opaque and largely unwilling to offer info and disclosures, particularly round this battle, in a method that’s incomparable to most different sectors,” mentioned Gayatri Khandhadai, head of expertise and human rights on the BHRRC, on the time.
“More and more, we’re seeing the central function that expertise is enjoying in battle, and this function is barely going to get extra embedded as we go ahead. With the growing focus of the ICC, if I had been an organization or an investor, I might begin worrying about what this implies for me.”
Laptop Weekly contacted each firm talked about on this story about their inclusion in Albanese’s report, in addition to why they haven’t ceased their enterprise actions within the area regardless of the litany of alleged human rights violations and worldwide crimes perpetrated by Israel.
Nonetheless, solely Lockheed Martin – a key provider within the worldwide F-35 programme that gives superior fighter jets to the US, UK, Israel and different allied nations – responded: “Overseas army gross sales are government-to-government transactions. Discussions about these gross sales are greatest addressed by the US authorities.”
