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un human rights council
Francesca Albanese Names and Shames Israel's Corporate Genocide Partners
As bank accounts swell, more Palestinian bodies are piled up in morgues, mass graves, or are scattered in the streets of Jabaliya and Khan Younis.
Jul 13, 2025
Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in occupied Palestine, stands as a testament to the notion of speaking truth to power. This "power" is not solely embodied by Israel or even the United States, but by an international community whose collective relevance has tragically failed to stem the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Her latest report, From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide, submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council on July 3, marks a seismic intervention. It unflinchingly names and implicates companies that have not only allowed Israel to sustain its war and genocide against Palestinians, but also confronts those who have remained silent in the face of this unfolding horror.
Albanese's "Economy of Genocide" is far more than an academic exercise or a mere moral statement in a world whose collective conscience is being brutally tested in Gaza. The report is significant for multiple, interlocking reasons. Crucially, it offers practical pathways to accountability that transcend mere diplomatic and legal rhetoric. It also presents a novel approach to international law, positioning it not as a delicate political balancing act, but as a potent tool to confront complicity in war crimes and expose the profound failures of existing international mechanisms in Gaza.
Two vital contexts are important to understanding the significance of this report, considered a searing indictment of direct corporate involvement, not only in the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, but Israel's overall settler-colonial project.
This madness needs to stop, and, since the U.N. is incapable of stopping it, then individual governments, civil society organizations, and ordinary people must do the job.
First, in February 2020, following years of delay, the U.N. Human Rights Council released a database that listed 112 companies involved in business activities within illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine. The database exposes several corporate giants—including Airbnb, Booking.com, Motorola Solutions, JCB, and Expedia—for helping Israel maintain its military occupation and apartheid.
This event was particularly earth-shattering, considering the U.N.'s consistent failure at reining in Israel, or holding accountable those who sustain its war crimes in Palestine. The database was an important step that allowed civil societies to mobilize around a specific set of priorities, thus pressuring corporations and individual governments to take morally guided positions. The effectiveness of that strategy was clearly detected through the exaggerated and angry reactions of the U.S. and Israel. The U.S. said it was an attempt by "the discredited" council "to fuel economic retaliation," while Israel called it a "shameful capitulation" to pressure.
The Israeli genocide in Gaza, starting on October 7, 2023, however, served as a stark reminder of the utter failure of all existing U.N. mechanisms to achieve even the most modest expectations of feeding a starving population during a time of genocide. Tellingly, this was the same conclusion offered by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, who, in September 2024, stated that the world had "failed the people of Gaza."
This failure continued for many more months and was highlighted in the U.N.'s inability to even manage the aid distribution in the strip, entrusting the job to the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a mercenary-run violent apparatus that has killed and wounded thousands of Palestinians. Albanese herself, of course, had already reached a similar conclusion when, in November 2023, she confronted the international community for "epically failing" to stop the war and to end the "senseless slaughtering of innocent civilians."
Albanese's new report goes a step further, this time appealing to the whole of humanity to take a moral stance and to confront those who made the genocide possible. "Commercial endeavors enabling and profiting from the obliteration of innocent people's lives must cease," the report declares, pointedly demanding that "corporate entities must refuse to be complicit in human rights violations and international crimes or be held to account."
According to the report, categories of complicity in the genocide are divided into arms manufacturers, tech firms, building and construction companies, extractive and service industries, banks, pension funds, insurers, universities, and charities.
These include Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Amazon, Palantir, IBM, and even Danish shipping giant Maersk, among nearly 1,000 other firms. It was their collective technological know-how, machinery, and data collection that allowed Israel to kill, to date, over 57,000 and wound over 134,000 in Gaza, let alone maintain the apartheid regime in the West Bank.
What Albanese's report tries to do is not merely name and shame Israel's genocide partners but to tell us, as civil society, that we now have a comprehensive frame of reference that would allow us to make responsible decisions, put pressure on, and hold accountable these corporate giants.
"The ongoing genocide has been a profitable venture," Albanese writes, citing Israel's massive surge in military spending, estimated at 65% from 2023 to 2024—reaching $46.5 billion.
Israel's seemingly infinite military budget is a strange loop of money, originally provided by the U.S. government, then recycled back through U.S. corporations, thus spreading the wealth between governments, politicians, corporations, and numerous contractors. As bank accounts swell, more Palestinian bodies are piled up in morgues, mass graves, or are scattered in the streets of Jabaliya and Khan Younis.
This madness needs to stop, and, since the U.N. is incapable of stopping it, then individual governments, civil society organizations, and ordinary people must do the job, because the lives of Palestinians should be of far greater value than corporate profits and greed.
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'We'll Own It': Trump Floats US Takeover of Gaza—After Ethnically Cleansing Palestinians
Standing beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump said that "the U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip," which would be emptied of Palestinians.
Feb 04, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday that the United States will "take over" Gaza after emptying the embattled enclave of nearly all its native Palestinians, sparking a firestorm of criticism that included allegations of intent to commit ethnic cleansing.
Speaking during a press conference with fugitive Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, Trump told reporters, "The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too."
"We'll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site, and get rid of the destroyed buildings—level it out and create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area," Trump continued.
"We're going to develop it, create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it will be something that the entire Middle East could be very proud of," he said, evoking the proposals of varying seriousness to build Jewish-only beachfront communities over the ruins of Gaza.
Trump said that U.S. developers will "level it out" and build the "Riviera of the Middle East" after Palestinians—"all of them"—leave Palestine's coastal enclave.
Doubling down on his January call for the removal of most of Gaza's population to Egypt and Jordan—both of which vehemently rejected the proposal—Trump said that "it would be my hope that we could do something really nice, really good, where [Palestinians] wouldn't want to return."
"Why would they want to return?" asked Trump. "The place has been hell."
Asked how many Palestinians should leave Gaza, Trump replied, "all of them," citing a figure of 1.7-1.8 million Palestinians out of an estimated population of approximately 2.3 million people.
The forced transfer of a population by an occupying power is a war crime, according to Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention—under which Israel's settler colonies in the occupied West Bank are also illegal.
"I don't think people should be going back to Gaza," Trump continued. "Gaza is not a place for people to be living, and the only reason they want to go back, and I believe this strongly, is because they have no alternative. If they had an alternative, they'd much rather not go back to Gaza and live in a beautiful alternative that's safe."
Asked if he would deploy U.S. troops to Gaza, Trump said that "we'll do what's necessary. If it's necessary, we'll do that."
Palestinian Ambassador to the U.N. Riyad Mansour responded by affirming that "our country and our home is the Gaza Strip."
"It's part of Palestine," he stressed. "Our homeland is our homeland."
Responding to Trump's remarks, Netanyahu praised his ally's "willingness to puncture conventional thinking" and stand behind Israel.
"[Trump] sees a different future for that piece of land that has been the focus of so much terrorism, so many attacks against us, so many trials and so many tribulations," Netanyahu told reporters as he stood beside the U.S. leader. "He has a different idea, and I think it's worth paying attention to this. We're talking about it. He's exploring it with his people, with his staff."
"I think it's something that could change history," Netanyahu added, "and it's worthwhile really pursuing this avenue."
There is currently a fragile cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, where more than 15 months of Israeli bombardment, invasion, and siege have left more than 170,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing and more than 2 million others forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened, according to local and international officials and agencies.
Numerous Israeli leaders have advocated the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza and the Jewish recolonization of the coastal enclave, most of whose inhabitants are the descendants of Palestinians forcibly expelled from other parts of Palestine during the establishment of the modern state of Israel in the late 1940s. Palestinians ethnically cleansed during what they call the Nakba, or catastrophe, have since been denied their U.N.-guaranteed right of return to their homeland.
Last November, former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon acknowledged that the ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza was underway. Other Israeli political and military leaders have said that the so-called "Generals' Plan"—a strategy to starve and ethnically cleanse Palestinians from northern Gaza—was effectively in progress.
Palestinian-American journalist Ramzy Baroud responded to Trump's remarks in a video posted on social media Tuesday.
"Now, you would say, 'Wait a minute, Trump seems to be really, really determined, his heart is set on ethnically cleansing Palestinians, and this subject is back on the table,'" Baroud said. "The question is, whose table? It's not on the table of the Palestinian people."
Earlier Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and continuing the freeze on funding for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which Israel has baselessly
accused of being a terrorist organization.
In a fact sheet viewed by multiple media outlets, the White House asserted that UNHRC "has not fulfilled its purpose and continues to be used as a protective body for countries committing horrific human rights violations."
"The UNHRC has demonstrated consistent bias against Israel, focusing on it unfairly and disproportionately in council proceedings," the White House continued. "In 2018, the year President Trump withdrew from the UNHRC in his first administration, the organization passed more resolutions condemning Israel than Syria, Iran, and North Korea combined."
UNHRC spokesperson Pascal Sim noted Tuesday that the U.S. has been an observer state, not a UNHRC member, since January 1, and according to U.N. rules, it cannot "technically withdraw from an intergovernmental body that is no longer part of."
The UNRWA funding pause is based on Israeli claims—reportedly extracted from Palestinian prisoners in an interrogation regime rife with torture and abuse—that a dozen of the agency's more than 13,000 workers in Gaza were involved in the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack. These claims prompted numerous nations including the United States to cut off funding for UNRWA last year. The U.S. had been UNRWA's biggest benefactor, providing $300-400 million annually to the lifesaving organization.
UNRWA fired nine employees in response to Israel's claim, even as the agency admitted there was no evidence linking the staffers to October 7. Faced with this lack of evidence, the European Union and countries including Japan, Germany, Canada, and Australia reinstated funding for UNRWA. Last March, then-U.S. President Joe Biden signed a bill prohibiting American funding for the agency.
Israeli lawmakers have also
banned UNRWA from operating in Israel, severely hampering the agency's ability to carry out its mission throughout Palestine, including in Gaza and the illegally occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
According to the most recent UNRWA situation report, at least 272 of the agency's workers have been killed by Israeli forces, which since October 2023 have bombed numerous schools, shelters, and other facilities used by the agency.
William Deere, the director of UNRWA's Washington, D.C. office, told PBS earlier this week that "there is no alternative to UNRWA."
"UNRWA performs a unique function in the U.N. system," Deere explained. "We are a direct service provider. We run... a healthcare network, we run an education system, we provide relief and social services."
As U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said last month, "UNRWA has been carrying out activities in the occupied Palestinian territory for more than 70 years... and has thus accumulated unparalleled experience in providing assistance that is tailored to the specific needs of Palestine refugees."
Trump's executive order preceded his meeting with Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court after it issued arrest warrants for him and Yoav Gallant, his former defense minister, last November for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. The tribunal also issued a warrant for Hamas leader Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri.
The U.S. president's directives also followed his January freeze on foreign aid to countries except for Israel and Egypt, and his plan to shut down the United States Agency for International Development.
This article and its headline have been updated to include Trump's call for U.S. ownership of Gaza.
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UN Expert Demands Full Legal Protection for Climate Refugees
"The human rights implications of climate change displacement, in particular across international borders, are significant and truly disturbing," said the special rapporteur.
Jun 27, 2023
The top expert on the climate crisis at the United Nations human rights office said Tuesday that the international community must recognize that climate-related disasters including drought and sea level rise have become one the biggest drivers of displacement and ensure that the rights of people forced to leave their homes for these reasons are protected.
With 30.7 million people displaced in 2020 due to events related to weather and the climate—primarily drought, which was blamed for a famine in Madagascar and forced more than 1 million people to leave their homes in Somalia in 2021 and 2022—the global community "must realize its responsibility to protect people displaced across borders by climate change impacts," said Ian Fry, special rapporteur on human rights in the context of climate change.
Fry presented his findings about climate refugees and human rights in a thematic report to the U.N. Human Rights Council.
People who are displaced due to climate-related events are at risk of violations related to their human rights to food, water, sanitation, housing, and education, and in some cases, "their basic right to life," said Fry.
Between 2014 and 2022, more than 50,000 people died while migrating, and more than half of those deaths occurred when they were traveling to or within Europe, including people who crossed the Mediterranean Sea.
Fry presented his report less than two weeks after hundreds of refugees drowned after attempting to travel to Italy via the Mediterranean in an overcrowded fishing boat. The vessel, in which about 300 of 750 passengers were from Pakistan, capsized in front of a Greek Coast Guard ship. Greek officials are now facing questions about their response to the ship when it was in crisis.
A study of migration trends by researchers in New Zealand in 2019 found that the effects of the climate crisis, including flooding and temperature extremes, are now causing migration at a higher rate than poverty or a lack of political freedom.
"The effects of climate change are becoming more severe, and the number of people displaced across international borders is rapidly increasing," said Fry in his report.
The special rapporteur called on the Human Rights Council to submit a resolution to the U.N. General Assembly to "address displacement and legal protection for people all over the world affected by the climate crisis" by developing an optional prorocol under the 1951 Refugee Convention.
"Until then," Fry said, "I urge all nations to develop national legislation to provide humanitarian visas for persons displaced across international borders due to climate change, as an interim measure."
"The human rights implications of climate change displacement, in particular across international borders, are significant and truly disturbing," he added.
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