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'This Must Stop': 15 Companies Profiting Off Israeli Occupation and Genocide in Gaza
"It is unacceptable that states and companies are aware that their revenues come from death, destruction, and immense suffering of Palestinians, yet they have decided to look away," said the head of Amnesty International.
Sep 19, 2025
Amnesty International on Thursday published a briefing that pressures governments, public institutions, and companies to stop contributing to Israel's unlawful military occupation of Palestinian territories, system of apartheid against Palestinians, and genocide in the Gaza Strip.
"This must stop. Human dignity is not a commodity," Amnesty International secretary general Agnès Callamard said in a statement. "While Palestinian mothers in Gaza are left to watch their children waste away from starvation under Israel's genocide, arms companies and others continue to reap substantial profits."
The human rights group's new report "identifies actions that states must take to fulfill their obligations, from banning and barring companies contributing or directly linked to Israel’s crimes, to effective legislation and regulation, and including divesting and ceasing purchases or contracts," she noted. "It also lists actions companies should take, such as suspending sales or contracts and making divestments."
The briefing—titled Pull the Plug on the Political Economy Enabling Israel's Crimes—lists 15 firms for which Amnesty "has gathered credible evidence" of contributing to Israel's illegal actions, based on "primary research, companies' published human rights policies, corporate press releases, transcripts of investor calls, quarterly earnings statements, company promotional material and/or media sources, including statements made by company representatives to the media."
"We cannot allow the immense, unfathomable suffering of the Palestinian people to be ignored for a minute longer."
Amnesty "has documented the abuses by several of these companies for years," the report explains. The group wrote to all of them, "asking questions about their activities" in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT), and "expressing concerns of the human rights violations described in this briefing before making them public."
"Eleven out of the 15 companies were contacted at different times from 2017 to 2024 about their activities described in this briefing and asked to provide a response," the briefing details. "In 2025, 13 out of 15 companies were contacted by Amnesty International and five companies sent replies, which are reflected in this briefing and previously published research that is cited; two replies are annexed in their entirety."
Amnesty spotlighted the US multinationals Boeing, which manufactures bombs and guidance kits "being used in unlawful air strikes in the occupied Gaza Strip," and Lockheed Martin, which "supplies and services F-16s and the growing fleet of F-35 combat aircraft—the backbone of the Israeli Air Force." It also targeted Israel Aerospace Industries, Elbit Systems, and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, "the three largest Israeli arms companies."
However, it's not only the supply of military goods and services that "must be stopped," Amnesty underscored, also advocating for cutting off Israel's supply of surveillance and cloud infrastructure. The report specifically flags biometric tools from the Chinese company Hikvision, facial recognition software from the Israeli firm Corsight, and artificial intelligence products and services from the US-based Palantir Technologies.
The group further argued that "all trade and investment contributing to Israel's unlawful occupation, system of apartheid, or genocide must be banned." It took aim at Mekorot, an Israeli government water company operating in the OPT, as well as the South Korean HD Hyundai, which "produces heavy machinery that has been widely used in demolitions of Palestinian-owned structures, homes, and businesses."
The report also notes that the Spanish firm Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles "provides transportation materials and services to Israel for the Jerusalem Light Rail project, which connects illegal Israeli settlements in occupied East Jerusalem with each other, as well as with West Jerusalem."
Additionally, Amnesty pointed to its 2019 report "that exposed how the operations of online tourism companies such as Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia, and TripAdvisor contributed to the maintenance, development, and expansion of Israeli settlements in the OPT, namely the West Bank including East Jerusalem, in violation of international law." The group says that it "called on these companies to responsibly disengage from doing business in Israeli settlements, but they continue to do so."
The report emphasizes that "the list is illustrative, nonexhaustive, and preliminary. Nevertheless, the range of industries and sizes of companies included in this document highlights the scale and scope of the role of economic actors that enable and sustain Israel's unlawful occupation and its crimes under international law, including apartheid and genocide."
Callamard—whose group began describing Israel's destruction of Gaza as a genocide last December, after over a year of war—called on "people around the world to take peaceful actions" pushing countries and companies to stop "sustaining a government that has engineered famine and mass killing of civilians and denied Palestinians fundamental rights for decades."
"It is unacceptable that states and companies are aware that their revenues come from death, destruction, and immense suffering of Palestinians, yet they have decided to look away, maintain their business models regardless of the human cost, and indulge in their wealth," she said. "We cannot allow the immense, unfathomable suffering of the Palestinian people to be ignored for a minute longer."
Amnesty is far from alone in highlighting how, as Callamard put it, "every economic sector, the vast majority of states, and many private entities have knowingly contributed to or benefited from Israel's genocide in Gaza, and its brutal occupation and apartheid." The briefing was published just days after over 80 other civil society groups launched the "Stop Trade With Settlements" campaign, which demands that countries ban all trade with illegal Israeli settlements in the OPT.
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'I've Never Seen Anything Like It': Trump Policies Leave US Farmers in Dire Straits
"It's a five-alarm fire," one Kentucky soybean farmer said, describing the harmful effects of the president's tariffs.
Sep 16, 2025
As anticipated, US President Donald Trump's economic and immigration policies are harming American farmers' ability to earn a living—and testing the loyalty of one of the president's staunchest bases of support, according to reports published this week.
After Trump slapped 30% tariffs on Chinese imports in May, Beijing retaliated with measures including stopping all purchases of US soybeans. Before the trade war, a quarter of the soybeans—the nation's number one export crop—produced in the United States were exported to China. Trump's tariffs mean American soybean growers can't compete with countries like Brazil, the world's leading producer and exporter of the staple crop and itself the target of a 50% US tariff.
"We depend on the Chinese market. The reason we depend so much on this market is China consumes 61% of soybeans produced worldwide," Kentucky farmer Caleb Ragland, who is president of the American Soybean Association, told News Nation on Monday. "Right now, we have zero sold for this crop that’s starting to be harvested right now.”
Ragland continued:
It’s a five-alarm fire for our industry that 25% of our total sales is currently missing. And right now we are not competitive with Brazil due to the retaliatory tariffs that are in place. Our prices are about 20% higher, and that means that the Chinese are going elsewhere because they can find a better value.
And the American soybean farmers and their families are suffering. They are 500,000 of us that produce soybeans, and we desperately need markets, and we need opportunity and a leveled playing field.
“There’s an artificial barrier that is built with these tariffs that makes us not be competitive," Ragland added.
Tennessee Soybean Promotion Council executive director Stefan Maupin likened the tariffs to "death by a thousand cuts."
“We’re in a significant and desperate situation where... none of the crops that farmers grow right now return a profit,” Maupin told the Tennessee Lookout Monday. “They don’t even break even.”
Alan Meadows, a fifth-generation soybean farmer in Lauderdale County, Tennessee, said that “this has been a really tough year for us."
“It started off really good," Meadows said. "We were in the field in late March, which is early for us. But then the wheels came off, so to speak, pretty quick.”
It started with devastating flooding in April, followed by a drier-than-usual summer. Higher supply costs due to inflation and Trump's tariffs exacerbated the dire situation.
“So much of what has happened and what’s going on here is totally out of our control,” Meadows said. “We just want a free, fair, and open market where we can sell our goods... as competitively as anybody else around the world. And we do feel that we produce a superior product here in the United States, and we just need to have the markets.”
Farmers are desperate for help from the federal government. However, Congress has not passed a new Farm Bill—legislation authorizing funding for agriculture and food programs—since 2018, without which "we do not have a workable safety net program when things like this happen in our economy," according to Maupin.
Maupin added that farmers “have done everything right, they’ve managed their finances well, they have put in a good crop... but they cannot change the weather, they cannot change the economy, they cannot change the markets."
"The weather is in the control of a higher power," he added, "and the economy and the markets are in control of Washington, DC."
It's not just soybean farmers who are hurting. Tim Maxwell, a 65-year-old Iowa grain and hog farmer, told the BBC Sunday that "our yields, crops, and weather are pretty good—but our [interest from] markets right now is on a low."
Despite his troubles, Maxwell remains supportive of Trump, saying that he is "going to be patient," adding, "I believe in our president."
However, there is a limit to Maxwell's patience with Trump.
"We're giving him the chance to follow through with the tariffs, but there had better be results," he said. "I think we need to be seeing something in 18 months or less. We understand risk—and it had better pay off."
It's also not just Trump's economic policies that are putting farmers in a squeeze. The president's anti-immigrant crackdown has left many farmers without the labor they need to operate.
“The whole thing is screwed up,” John Painter, a Pennsylvania organic dairy farmer and three-time Trump voter, told Politico Monday. “We need people to do the jobs Americans are too spoiled to do.”
As Politico noted:
The US agricultural workforce fell by 155,000—about 7%—between March and July, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That tracks with Pew Research Center data that shows total immigrant labor fell by 750,000 from January through July. The labor shortage piles onto an ongoing economic crisis for farmers exacerbated by dwindling export markets that could leave them with crop surpluses.
“People don’t understand that if we don’t get more labor, our cows don’t get milked and our crops don’t get picked,” said Tim Wood, another Pennsylvania dairy farmer and a member of the state's Farm Bureau board of directors.
Charlie Porter, who heads the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau’s Ag Labor and Safety Committee, told Politico that “it’s a shame you have hard-working people who need labor, and a group of people who are willing to work, and they have to look over their shoulder like they’re criminals—they're not."
Painter also said that he is "very disappointed" by Trump's immigration policies.
“It’s not right, what they’re doing,” he said of the administration. “All of us, if we look back in history, including the president, we have somebody that came to this country for the American dream.”
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Farmers are in Trouble—Restructuring the USMCA Could Turn Things Around
New labeling requirements to ensure the integrity of domestic markets, as well as price guarantees tied to anti-dumping measures, could improve the economic prospects of producers amid our ongoing trade war.
Sep 16, 2025
Farmers may be the proverbial “canaries in the coal mine” when it comes to the effects of US President Donald Trump’s grand tariff experiment.
Point in fact—corn and soy prices are experiencing precipitous falls in no small part due to tariffs that China has placed on US imports. Cotton prices are dropping for the same reason, as nearly 80% of this crop is destined for export and China slapped a 15% retaliatory tariff on it. Prices for pork and beef appear on a different trajectory, with the latter benefiting from domestic shortages. But even here, trouble is on the horizon as China has cut back on imports from the US. This, as Brazil is exporting more soy, beef, and cotton to China to replace what US farmers once sent. It is no coincidence that the percentage of farm income in 2025 coming from government payments—25%—is approaching the level it was at when the Covid-19 pandemic devastated markets in 2020. The $59 billion dedicated for farmers’ relief payments in the "One Big Beautiful Bill" is testament to the fact that the economic future of rural America appears bleak.
The economic challenges our farmers face places even more pressure on the upcoming United States-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) renegotiations. Even though set for next year, Mexico, Canada, and the US are already staking positions and signaling their intentions. Look no further than Mexico contemplating placing tariffs on Chinese imports, a move clearly meant to stay in the good, however fickle, graces of the Trump administration.
Looking out for US farmers, there are some concrete policies that a renegotiated USMCA could feature. Specifically, new labeling requirements to ensure the integrity of domestic markets, as well as price guarantees tied to anti-dumping measures, could improve the economic prospects of producers as they struggle to weather the uncertainty of our ongoing trade war.
The problem is that in the past, the Trump administration took the wrong approach for how to improve the situation of producers when dealing with our neighbors. Concretely, when Trump renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) last time he was in office, besides rebranding it the USMCA, he also sought to open Canadian markets for US dairy exports.
Eking out marginal increases, those gains ultimately made no real improvement in the prices that farmers received. Proof of this is how dairy farmers have consistently struggled to stay in business, as we have witnessed a 25% nationwide decline from 2017 to 2023 in the number of licensed dairy herds. The recent uptick in dairy prices has nothing to do with USMCA, but instead to a reduction in feed costs and farmers cutting down their herds by selling heifers for beef.
Farmers are known for their resiliency. At the same time, they can only take so much.
Failing to finagle improved prices for farmers from changing exports, this time USMCA negotiations should focus on ensuring the integrity of markets.
The first step toward this would be for the US to reinstate Mandatory Country of Origin Labeling (MCOOL). Originally part of the 2002 Farm Bill before being removed after Canada and Mexico put pressure on the World Trade Organization (WTO), this program would make retailers disclose the origins of their products, including milk, dairy, meat, fish, and fruits, and vegetables. As such, MCOOL allows consumers to make informed purchasing decisions and choose our products instead of picking the cheapest goods of dubious quality that may come from abroad.
Such a change would assist ranchers particularly, as since Trump has taken office, Brazilian beef imports flooded US markets. And since the WTO has been paralyzed since Trump’s first term when he chose not to appoint judges to the institution’s appellate court, now MCOOL can return without opposition.
Next, pricing policies could be put in place to assure a decent income for farmers and prevent dumping.
The US has already made one move in this direction, placing a 17% tariff on tomato imports and accusing Mexican growers of dumping, that is, exporting goods into another market at below cost to drive competitors out of business.
Preventing dumping also cuts both ways, as when NAFTA was first introduced, US corn imports drove Mexican farmers out of business, into poverty, and then to cross the border. Accordingly, if Mexico wants to restrict the flow of some commodity south, such as corn, they should be allowed to.
To avoid a tit-for-tat battle, resolving this issue requires setting floor prices in some capacity. Like what they have already done with wages for automobile workers, negotiators could do the same for grains, as well as for livestock. They could also set limits on what comes from outside the trade bloc, like Mexico appears ready to do with China. The same could be done with Brazil and its beef, or perhaps with the many European countries that send billions of dollars of cheese a year into the US. Cheese is a critical element of dairy pricing, and decreasing imports could lead to more US production and better prices for farmers.
Farmers are known for their resiliency. At the same time, they can only take so much. Export-driven growth may sound like a good idea, but the reality has been different. A renegotiated USMCA that actually puts farmers first could turn things around and give producers a fighting chance to make a decent income and stay on the land.
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