A United Nations officer assigned to oversee the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip charged Israel with using companies to carry out a “settler-colonial” displacement project aimed at apartheid and genocide.
Francesca Albanese, an Italian legal and human rights academic, said that while political leaders and governments shirked their obligations, "far too many corporate entities have profited from the Israeli economy of illegal occupation, apartheid and now genocide."
Albanese, who was appointed U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian Territories in 2022, has published a report entitled "From economy of occupation to economy of genocide."
Israel has long accused Albanese of lacking fairness, neutrality and impartiality.
The Israeli government rejects cooperation with the U.N. Human Rights Council and its organs.
The Israeli diplomatic representation in Geneva described her report as being "motivated by her obsessive hate-driven agenda to delegitimize the existence of the State of Israel" and as a flagrant abuse of her office.
It described her tactics as "scandalous" and aimed at coercion. It added that the report would go into history's dustbin.
Albanese's report investigates what it terms "the corporate machinery sustaining the Israeli settler-colonial project of displacement and replacement of the Palestinians in the occupied territory."
It goes on to describe "the role of corporate entities in sustaining the illegal Israeli occupation and its ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza" and says that corporate interests underpin the Israeli settler-colonial logic of the displacement, replacement and dispossession of Palestinians.
It adds that corporate actors have contributed to the acceleration of this displacement-replacement process since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel mounted from the Gaza Strip that has led to the current war.
