Geneva (AFP) – The United Nations on Friday released a long-awaited update of its database of companies with activities in Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories, listing 158 firms from 11 countries. UN rights chief Volker Turk has condemned as a war crime Israel’s policy of settlements on Palestinian territory in the occupied West Bank.
Big firms such as Airbnb, Booking.com, Motorola Solutions, and TripAdvisor remained on the list, while several companies, including Alstom and Opodo, were removed, the non-exhaustive database showed. Most of the companies were based in Israel, while others were based in Canada, China, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Britain, and the United States. The UN rights office report called on companies to “take appropriate action to address the adverse human rights impacts” of their activities.
“Where business enterprises identify that they have caused or contributed to adverse human rights impacts, they should provide for or cooperate in remediation through appropriate processes,” it stressed. Turk said in a statement: “This report underscores the due diligence responsibility of businesses working in contexts of conflict to ensure their activities do not contribute to human rights abuses.”
The list was first produced by the UN human rights office in 2020 amid harsh Israeli criticism. It came in response to a UN Human Rights Council resolution four years earlier demanding a database of firms that profited from business in illegally occupied Palestinian territory. The UN rights office was asked to list companies found to be taking part in any of 10 specific activities, including construction, surveillance, demolitions, and destruction of agricultural land in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
It has stressed that listing companies in the database was “not, and does not purport to be, a judicial or quasi-judicial process”. Despite a requirement for the database to be updated annually, it has been revised just once before. That was in 2023, when only the 112 firms that had figured on the original list were reviewed. Fifteen of them were removed for various reasons, leaving 97. Friday’s release marks the first update that includes fresh names.
“A total of 68 new companies were added to the list published in 2023, while seven of those…were removed as they were no longer involved in any of the activities concerned,” the rights office said. The list is not exhaustive, the rights office said, acknowledging that it had only had time to review 215 of the 596 companies about which it received submissions. For the 2025 update, it said it had prioritized companies with a direct physical link in the settlements, in the fields of construction, real estate, mining, and quarries. The remainder will be assessed for future updates, it said.
The exercise has been contentious from the start. In 2020, Israel and its main ally Washington fiercely condemned the creation of the database. The then Israeli foreign minister Israel Katz slammed it as “a shameful surrender to pressure from countries and organisations who want to harm Israel”. The issue has become even thornier today, nearly two years into the war raging in Gaza, where Israel faces growing accusations of committing genocide. Violence in the West Bank has also soared since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel at the start of the Gaza war, even as Israeli government ministers have ramped up their calls to annex the West Bank.
© 2024 AFP
