Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, has called on countries to cut off all trade and financial ties with Israel, including a full arms embargo, and withdraw international support for what she termed an “economy of genocide”.Albanese made the comments in a speech to the Human Rights Council in Geneva on Thursday as she presented her latest report, which named dozens of companies she said were involved in supporting Israeli repression and violence towards Palestinians.
“The situation in the occupied Palestinian territory is apocalyptic,” she said. “Israel is responsible for one of the cruellest genocides in modern history.”
Nearly 57,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since the war, now in its 22nd month began, hundreds of thousands have been displaced multiple times, cities and towns have been razed, hospitals and schools targeted, and 85 percent of the besieged and bombarded enclave is now under Israeli military control, according to the UN.
‘For some, genocide is profitable’
The report, titled From economy of occupation to economy of genocide, detailed what it described as “the corporate machinery sustaining Israel’s settler-colonial project of displacement and replacement of the Palestinians in the occupied territory”.
The report singled out companies, including arms manufacturers, tech giants, heavy machinery companies and financial institutions, for their “complicity” in Israel’s repression of Palestinians, from sustaining Israeli expansion on occupied land to enabling the surveillance and killing of Palestinians. Advertisement
The report said that while political leaders had been shirking their r …
