At the 59th session of the UN Human Rights Council, Defence for Children International (DCI) delivered a statement highlighting how private companies continue to profit from Israel’s genocide, apartheid, and systematic dispossession of the Palestinian people — even as children in Gaza are being slaughtered, starved, and displaced.
DCI underscored that arms manufacturers, military technology firms, and corporations tied to illegal Israeli settlements are extracting profit from Palestinian suffering. These businesses operate with impunity, fueling a military-industrial complex that enables mass killings of children, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and the theft of land and resources.
Across the occupied Palestinian territory, companies in sectors like agriculture, mineral extraction, water, wine, and tourism commodify stolen land, reinforcing a system of racial domination. This entrenches structural deprivation, robbing Palestinian children of their economic, cultural, and environmental inheritance.
DCI called on all UN Member States to:
- Expand and update the UN database on companies involved in Israeli settlements, ensuring it is adequately resourced to promote transparency and accountability.
- Terminate economic ties with businesses complicit in illegal settlements and the exploitation of Palestinian resources, including by prohibiting trade, investment, and tourism that sustain these violations.
- Regulate companies under their jurisdiction that support Israel’s apartheid system, end public investments in complicit entities, and apply the UN Guiding Principles on Human Rights Impact Assessments to scrutinize state economic policies.
- Reaffirm the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and sovereignty over their land and resources, explicitly condemning the role of corporate actors in perpetuating environmental harm and dispossession.
“There must be no profit in apartheid, no business in dispossession, and no return on the erasure of Palestinian children,” DCI stressed. Now more than ever, the international community must act decisively to hold both private and public actors accountable, and uphold the rights and dignity of Palestinian children.
Read the Full Statement (in English)
Watch the Statement: