The United Nations has expanded its database of companies linked to Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise, listing 158 firms operating in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Most are Israeli companies, but the update also includes major European and American corporations that claim to uphold human rights at home, yet profit from violations abroad.
Last week’s latest update added 68 companies from 11 countries and removed seven. Among those remaining on the list are major travel platforms, including US-based Expedia, Booking Holdings, and Airbnb.
The database also highlights how global firms supply the raw materials, machinery, and technology that help the expansion of illegal settlements.
According to Ayed Ghafry, a Palestinian activist based in North Ramallah, what’s happening now is a foreign–Israeli partnership in colonising Palestinian land.
“These companies divide confiscated land into smaller parcels to sell to settlers and promote commercial housing projects abroad. They operate with heavy machinery such as bulldozers and earthmovers, backed by major international partners (such as heavy-duty machinery brand CAT),” Ghafry tells TRT World.
“Investors can now go online and reserve homes in illegal settlements across the occupied West Bank, which is a modern repetition of the 1948 Nakba, when Jews were recruited from abroad to settle in Palestine.”
Among the other firms on the list is British heavy-machinery producer JCB. Its bulldozers have become a fixture at demolitions of Palestinian homes and farmland, clearing space for illegal settlements to expand. Rights groups have documented JCB equipment at demolition sites across the occupied West Bank.
From another corner of Europe, Spain’s CAF and Portugal’s Steconfer continue work on the Jerusalem Light Rail, a tramway that connects West Jerusalem to illegal settlements built on annexed land.
The project has been widely condemned for cementing Israeli control over occupied East Jerusalem and normalising illegal settlement integration into Israel’s urban fabric.
Meanwhile, Motorola Solutions, headquartered in the United States, provides the digital infrastructure for the occupation.
Its advanced surveillance systems guard illegal settlement perimeters, track movements, and support the checkpoint regime that fragments Palestinian life. In this way, technology designed for “security” profits from Israel’s control apparatus.
The overall settlement strategy has been decades in the making. Areas once declared “military zones” are now repurposed for illegal settlements, while Palestinians are confined to shrinking enclaves with no possibility of urban growth.
This is a decades-long tactic that pressures Palestinians to leave, disguised as voluntary migration, according to Bassam Bahar, Palestinian lawyer and activist from Abu Dis, occupied East Jerusalem.
“Foreign companies and countries make this possible. Their cement, machines, and investments accelerate settlement growth. Without their support, Israel could not expand at such unprecedented speed,” Bahar tells TRT World.
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The human cost of complicity
Since 1948, the establishment and expansion of illegal settlements has been at the core of Israel’s project to seize Palestinian land. What began with the Nakba when more than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled and hundreds of towns and villages were destroyed, continued in the years after, as Zionist leaders openly pursued the strategy of taking over one acre at a time.
The occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza in 1967 marked a turning point, unleashing waves of settlement building across the newly captured territories.
Despite being declared illegal under international law, successive Israeli governments openly announced new illegal settlement blocs and incentives for settlers, while turning a blind eye to settler violence against Palestinians.
The pattern has remained constant with land confiscation, construction, and demographic engineering to cement Israeli control. Each expansion was met with international condemnation yet no accountability, leaving corporations and foreign governments to profit from, or directly facilitate, the dispossession of Palestinians.
In April, in the largest such displacement since 1967, Israel drove nearly 40,000 Palestinians from their homes in the occupied West Bank.
Much of this displacement is linked to the expansion of illegal settlements, a process often facilitated by private companies. In the Ramallah region, two such firms stand out: Elyakim Ben Ari, once under international sanctions but revived after Trump’s election, and Shoham, which supplies caravans for settlers.
Both are active in eastern Ramallah in areas like Sinjil, Karyut, and Turmusayya and are tied to industrial ventures near Shilo.
From his home in Sinjil, Ghafry has been closely following these illegal settlement activities and the growing pressure they bring to surrounding communities.
It often begins with herders setting up camp with livestock, later shifting toward agricultural activity such as planting and farming, and eventually developing into residential housing with caravans. In some cases, these sites grow further into industrial areas, as seen near Shilo, where farmland was seized to establish a factory.
“This is how illegal settlement expansion develops, gradually and systematically. It always begins with settlers camping out in small groups, supplied and funded by the occupation authorities, settling in a designated area with a small herd.”
“Once they gain control of the site and make it inaccessible to Palestinians, it is officially transformed into an agricultural, residential, or industrial settlement depending on its strategic location,” Ghafry explains.
“The occupation forces prevent Palestinians from reaching their lands under the pretext of ‘closed military zones’, while illegal settlers continue expanding and annexing,” he adds.
According to Bahar, in occupied East Jerusalem, villages such as Abu Dis and al-Eizariya are now hemmed in by walls and checkpoints, with no space left for natural growth. What used to be living towns are now more like “open-air prisons”.
“What looks like a single settlement is in fact a cluster of interconnected ones. The strategy is to build a belt around East Jerusalem, cutting it off from the West Bank and locking Palestinian villages into isolated cantons,” says Bahar.
“Industrial zones are built on our confiscated land. Palestinians lose their farms and livestock, and in the end, we are forced to become cheap labour inside the very settlements that dispossessed us,” he adds.
Without foreign suppliers and financiers, Israel’s ability to expand illegal settlements would be far more limited.
“In the last phase alone, Israel has seized three times more land in just two years than it did in the previous 72 years combined. This was made possible through the involvement of foreign companies, international legal cover, and massive financial support,” Ghafry says.
“What keeps Palestinians rooted in their land is their faith, conviction, and deep sense of belonging. The official institutions are powerless, the world indifferent, but Palestinians remain steadfast, knowing that this land is a right they must defend to the last breath,” he adds.
For Palestinians, every new contract signed with a foreign corporation translates into more land loss, more displacement, and deeper entrenchment of a genocidal system.
