Since Israel began its brutal assault on Gaza in October 2023, observers have asked how the world could allow the indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinians to continue. Part of the answer is that numerous powerful corporations in the United States and overseas have profited from Israel’s actions, as well as from Israel’s ongoing efforts to avoid accountability.
In her bombshell July 2025 study, United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur for human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese named major global corporations that profit from Israel’s ongoing occupation and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Albanese listed companies that benefit from the displacement of Palestinians and from their replacement with Jewish Israelis through illegal settlements. She also described companies and others who have enabled these crimes by presenting misleading narratives about the conflict. Albanese explicitly focused on narratives propagated by financial companies and universities, but she also identified “legal, consulting, media and advertising” involvement in justifying Israel’s occupation and genocide. Further investigation of US-based consulting firms, social media, and public relations companies confirms that they have played a vital—yet often overlooked—role in sanitizing Israel’s genocide in Gaza and in deflecting the international condemnation that has increased in recent months.
Consulting: The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation as a Botched PR Campaign
By summer 2025, Israel realized that it was losing control of the narrative of its war on Gaza. While international pressure had only slowly responded to Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Palestinian civilians, images of starving children generated significantly greater outcry. Israel had previously justified the mass killings as the unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of Hamas’s close proximity to civilians, a justification that Israeli government spokespeople had used to create the narrative that Hamas was intentionally using Palestinians in Gaza as “human shields.” But Israel’s defenders now found it difficult to explain how deliberately starving Gaza served any purpose other than the elimination of the population.
In February 2025, with the assistance of the Boston Consulting Group, Israel and the United States created the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which began operating in Gaza in May 2025. Part of Israel’s motivation in forming the GHF was to replace UN agencies, especially UNRWA, in their leading role in distributing humanitarian aid in Gaza. From the outset, established humanitarian organizations refused to work with the GHF due to its disregard for humanitarian principles, such as by militarizing aid distribution and by forcing Palestinians to travel for food to one of only four distribution sites in Gaza; forced displacement is a war crime.
To supplement the Israeli military forces already present, GHF hired two security companies: Safe Reach Solutions and UG Solutions, both part of shell company Two Ocean Trust LLC, a Wyoming wealth management firm. During the January-March 2025 ceasefire, both companies had sent private military contractors to conduct security screening of Palestinians crossing through the Netzarim Corridor, which Israel created to divide northern from southern Gaza. Safe Reach Solutions founder and director Phil Reilly, a former CIA operative, had served as a senior advisor to the Boston Consulting Group for eight years, and helped to establish GHF. GHF additionally subcontracted Arkel International LLC, a US construction and logistics firm, to hire Eastern Europeans to drive its trucks into Gaza. These newly established private entities attracted private investors: Chicago private equity firm McNally Capital invested an undisclosed figure in Safe Reach Solutions. Meanwhile, UG Solutions, a company founded by former Green Beret Jameson Govoni, armed 96 US Special Forces veterans with M4 assault rifles to oversee aid distribution at GHF sites.
What began as an attempt to obscure Israel’s policy of intentional starvation and ethnic cleansing, became a public relations disaster.
Boston Consulting Group also developed plans for forcibly relocating Palestinians to Egypt, Jordan, Somalia, Somaliland, and the United Arab Emirates, while projecting $4.7 billion in economic benefits for countries that would agree to host Palestinians expelled by Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza. BCG developed a model envisaging that 25 percent of the population would “opt to leave” Gaza, with most of those not returning to the Strip. BCG calculated that it would cost $23,000 less per person to forcibly expel Palestinians than to support them to remain there during a future reconstruction of Gaza.
What essentially began as an attempt by BCG, one of the world’s most prestigious consulting firms, to obscure Israel’s policy of intentional starvation and ethnic cleansing soon became a public relations disaster. Whistleblower Anthony Aguilar, a GHF contractor, reported that he had witnessed IDF soldiers firing live ammunition at crowds desperate for aid at the Foundation’s sites. (On August 1, 2025, the United Nations reported that since the GHF began operations in May 2025, almost 1400 Palestinians had been killed while seeking food.) Meanwhile, GHF did little to prevent starvation; images of skeletal toddlers and reports of famine stoked international outrage, and by July 2025 Israel had been pressured to allow some international aid organizations to enter Gaza. The Boston Consulting Group went into damage control mode, blaming staff, establishing new protocols, and attempting to distance itself from GHF. Although Save the Children canceled its own consulting contract with BCG over the controversy, many major aid organizations, including the World Food Programme, the World Food Organization, and the Gates Foundation, do not appear to have done so.
Advertising and Media: Budgets for Hasbara Skyrocket
Consulting companies and private military contractors were not the only beneficiaries of Israel’s effort to perpetrate or cover up genocide. In its 2025 budget, Israel allocated an additional $150 million—20 times higher than previous budgets—to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for “public diplomacy,” also known as “hasbara” or pro-Israel propaganda.
The effects soon became apparent. Google received a contract for $45 million to run propaganda videos on YouTube, created by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, claiming that food was available in Gaza. X received a contract for $3 million for a pro-Israel advertising campaign, while Outbrain, a web-recommendation platform founded in 2006 by two former Israeli naval officers, received $2.1 million. Between January 2024 and July 2025, Israeli government advertising agency LAPAM ran more than 6,000 ads across Google platforms, with 2,000 on YouTube alone. In addition to formal advertising, Israel paid social media influencers $7,000 per post for pro-Israel content and brought influencers to GHF sites in an attempt to improve its image.
Israel has long invested in trying to improve its image abroad, especially in the United States, including through initiatives like “Brand Israel,” a state-engineered rebrand launched in 2006. The idea of Israel as a “startup nation” was promoted by Dan Senor and Saul Singer in their 2009 book of the same name that sought to portray Israel as uniquely supportive of tech entrepreneurship. Critics have pointed out that this portrayal of Israel—which highlights the role of the IDF in fostering equality and diversity—fails to acknowledge that mandatory military service is the result of Israel’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights. Nevertheless, the “startup nation” brand remains central to Israel’s efforts to improve its image.
Since the 2023 Gaza war began, Israel’s popularity has plummeted in the United States: September 2025 polling found that 59 percent of Americans held an unfavorable view of the Israeli government, the most negative such rating ever recorded. In response, Israel’s Foreign Minister is trying to staunch the outflow of support by partnering with President Donald Trump and his associates in the tech and media world. Pro-Israel billionaire Larry Ellison—the second-richest man in the world, the single largest private donor to the Israeli military, and a friend of Trump—is reportedly the lead investor in a consortium that hopes to purchase, for $14 billion, the US operations of TikTok from its Chinese owner. Pro-Israel US politicians have accused TikTok, where 43 percent of young Americans reportedly get their news, of supposedly promoting pro-Palestinian content. (A fund controlled by the Abu Dhabi royal family reportedly is also part of the Oracle-led consortium). Brad Parscale, Trump’s former digital campaign manager, registered as a foreign agent to work on Israel’s behalf and established Clocktower LLC, a media company aimed at Gen Z audiences that intends to train ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence chatbots to be more pro-Israel. The Israeli government also hired several American public relations firms to target right-wing US Evangelical Christians, long-time proponents of Christian Zionism, and to pay pastors for pro-Israel content. By trying to influence the views of young people in particular, the Israeli government seeks to avoid a future in which US taxpayers are no longer willing to allocate the country $3.8 billion per year in military aid, a figure that has increased to $21 billion in the two years since October 7, 2023.
Limited Pushback
Some companies have faced limited pushback for their willingness to participate in or whitewash Israel’s crimes. Several large tech companies, including Palantir, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, have contracts with the Israeli military and provide support for its operations in Gaza; a few are starting to reconsider accepting Israeli money. Facing pressure from shareholders and investors, in September 2025 Microsoft blocked Israel’s access to the Azure cloud platform, a surveillance program that Israel has used to collect data on Palestinians. Israel will instead rely more heavily on Google and Amazon. In 2021, the tech giants signed a cloud data storage contract with Israel called “Project Nimbus” for $1.2 billion, a deal that involved a workaround to violate both their own terms of service and legal guidelines, leading some Google employees to protest and to resign in response. Palantir has denied that it was involved in developing the AI targeting systems “Lavender” and “Gospel” that Israel has used to intentionally strike Palestinians at home with their families. In October 2024, Norway’s largest asset manager divested its $24 million in Palantir shares due to concerns about Palantir’s partnership with Israel. But other than Microsoft, tech corporations have maintained their lucrative contracts with Israel.
Pressure is growing for shareholders to divest from Israeli companies.
Pressure is growing for shareholders to divest from Israeli companies and the corporations that profit from its actions. In August 2025, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the largest in the world, divested from 11 Israeli companies. Incoming New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has said that he would maintain the current comptroller’s decision not to renew NYC pension fund investments in Israel. Yet as long as entities like BlackRock and Vanguard, the first and second largest asset managers in the world, remain heavily invested in Israel and in the corporations enabling occupation and genocide, it faces little real pressure.
For the Israeli government, reputation management may be important, but ultimately it is secondary to accomplishing its objectives in Gaza. Although the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is now widely seen as a fiasco, and the Boston Consulting Group suffered some reputational damage as a result of its involvement, Israel achieved its longstanding goal of undermining the UN’s role in Gaza, which it has long perceived as biased due to UN efforts to call attention to Israel’s systematic violations of international law. After October 7, when Israel wished to bypass the UN and control aid distribution, it spread the false narrative that Hamas was systematically stealing aid.
Israel also has a longstanding goal of dismantling UNRWA, the UN agency responsible for maintaining records of Palestinian refugees’ legal right of return, and that, until Israel’s total blockade in March 2025, had been bringing crucial aid supplies into Gaza. (UNRWA had previously maintained 400 aid distribution sites, in contrast to the four sites run by GHF.) Following Israeli accusations that UNRWA staff had participated in the October 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel, the Biden administration suspended US funding for the agency, a move that the Trump administration has continued. In October 2025, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest legal body of the UN, issued an advisory opinion stating that Israel had failed to provide evidence of UNRWA’s alleged links to violent extremism, and that Israel was required to allow UNRWA to operate. As with all other ICJ decisions regarding the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Israel intends to ignore the ruling. Ultimately, Israel achieved its goal of not only discrediting UNRWA, but also of undermining the entire notion that humanitarian aid should be delivered by neutral and nonmilitary actors.
Conclusion
Many US companies continue to partner with Israel because doing so remains so lucrative. After Israel launched its assault on Gaza, US military contractor stocks skyrocketed. Since the October 2023 war, Israel’s economy was expected to contract as the government increased military spending by 65 percent, but has instead remained relatively strong.
Before Trump announced his “20-point peace plan” for Gaza on September 29, 2025, momentum had been growing internationally to hold Israel accountable. During the UN General Assembly earlier that month, ten new countries had recognized the state of Palestine, a move that had no immediate impact on Palestinians’ lives but that was widely seen as a rebuke of Israel’s actions. In the US Congress, Democratic lawmakers introduced several bills designed to increase pressure on Israel, from insisting that Israel allow in aid, to blocking the provision of some American bombs. Yet following the announcement of the October 2025 ceasefire, this momentum seems to have stalled.
As Israel and its paid apologists try to shift the world’s attention away from genocide, they are already engaged in a concerted effort to promote a narrative of Gaza “ceasefire,” which may be followed by a narrative of “reconstruction.” However, Israel may conclude that its newly strengthened control of media and suppression of information out of Gaza and the West Bank sufficiently reduces international pressure, rendering even a reconstruction narrative unnecessary.
The views expressed in this publication are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab Center Washington DC, its staff, or its Board of Directors.
Featured image credit: Shutterstock/Anas Mohammed
