How Israel’s energy diplomacy is fueling the Gaza genocide
Leviathan offshore gas field
Energy Embargo for Palestine writes in Mondoweiss on 18 July 2025:
On March 17, 2025, Israel launched airstrikes across five municipalities across Gaza without warning. More than 400 Palestinians were murdered, including 100 children. The airstrikes violently ruptured the tentative ceasefire agreement brokered in January. Hours before the massacre, delegates from SOCAR, BP, and New Med arrived in Israel to officially announce a deal to explore the zone known as “Cluster I”; a 1700 sq km area near the Leviathan gas field operated by the U.S. global energy company, Chevron. Cluster I is one of several offshore exploration licenses tendered by Israel throughout the genocide, including licenses to extract gas from Palestinian waters annexed by Israel.
With this new contract, energy corporations are deepening their complicity in Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine and genocide of Palestinians. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, in her From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide report, specifically highlights the role of energy companies, describing that:
“By supplying Israel with coal, gas, oil and fuel, companies are contributing to civilian infrastructures that Israel uses to entrench permanent annexation and weaponises in the destruction of Palestinian life. The same infrastructure services the Israeli military while it obliterates Gaza, including the network supplying the resources that these companies have provided. The ostensibly civilian nature of such infrastructure does not exonerate a company of responsibility.”
As oil, coal, and gas fuel the very infrastructure that reinforces the occupation and murders Palestinians, calls for an energy embargo on Israel go hand-in-hand with calls for an arms embargo. Colombia has imposed a coal embargo, and oil trade unions in Brazil are pressuring the government to end the export of oil to Israel, which consisted of 2.7m barrels of crude oil in 2024 alone.
In the months since the short-lived January 19, 2025, ceasefire agreement, Israel has intensified its genocide in Gaza and formalized its plans for the forcible displacement of Palestinians from the strip. These escalations necessitate a stronger international strategy for confronting Zionist supply chains and holding Israel to account.